Robert Marchessault

"My painting is an inquiry. I make images as a way of responding to experiences that are important to me. Experiences that help me to understand why I’m in this world often happen when I am outside in large open spaces.

Painted images act as a tool. I respond to the spaces my art suggests. That response is usually non-verbal. I am interested in the experience of non-duality that “getting lost” in big spaces can sometimes produce for me. The paintings have gone through a range of artistic treatments with the recent years seeing a focus on space, light, textures, atmosphere and distance.

My landscape paintings are made from memory, not from on-site drawings or photographs. I use memory as a filtering agent to remove non-essential visual elements. When a work is successful, it must have a sense of poetry.

There is nothing “new” about the way I make art. Jean Baudrillard (one of the gurus of the new ‘Postmodern’ ethos) has said that in the sphere of art, every practice has exhausted itself, and that all an artist can do is “to recombine and play with the forms already produced.” (Steven Best & Douglas Kellner, Postmodern Theory: Critical Interrogations. New York: The Guilford Press, NY., 1991, 128.) With this in mind, I do not seek to make art that is “new”. My art accepts the visual devices handed down to painters and strives to use those as an investigative tool. The “new” that I hope will happen is a new association, understanding or experience for a viewer."

- Robert Marchessault