Acadie

March 12 – April 7, 2010

Studio 21 Fine Art is very pleased to announce a group exhibition of paintings by beloved Acadian artists: Francis Coutellier, Yvon Gallant, Raymond Martin, and Romeo Savoie.

Francis Coutellier lives in Shediac, New Brunswick.  His work employs the use of colourful repeated iconography such as horses, boats, teacups, and pipes (“a la Magritte”), to convey deeper, more spiritual realities that exist “below the surface” of the paintings.

Coutellier pursued his art studies at the Art School of Maredous, the National Superior School of Architecture and Visual Arts, and the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, New York.  He received a Master’s Degree in Photography from the State University of New York, under the direction of Robert Frank, Joan Lyons and Michael Snow.  His work is held in the collections of the Musée des Beaux Arts in Brussels, the Beaverbrook Art Gallery, Harvard University, Memorial University and the University of New Brunswick, among others.

Born in Moncton, Yvon Gallant has lived there most of his life.  A graduate from the visual arts department at l'Université de Moncton, 1976, Gallant emulated the familiar 'folk' forms and sensibilities that surrounded his upbringing and were part of his everyday life.  His work relies heavily on storytelling - along with myths, superstitions, family rituals, and social occasions. The stories he tells through bright paint are spiked with wit & humour, parody, and playfulness in a truly unpretentious and endearing manner.  Recognizable trademarks of his style include the featureless 'blank' faces of his subjects, expressive hands, and the black outlined images enclosing areas of color.

Raymond Martin is a child psychologist and self-taught painter.  He was born in Lac-a-la-Croix, Lac-Saint-Jean, Québec and has called Moncton home for more than 20 years.  His paintings are whimsical and distinct in technique, as he uses a contrasting line around all of his figures and flat areas of colouration.  Depicting everything from his escapades up North to animals and children, his scenes are extracted from everyday life.

Martin’s work is held in important public collections, such as the Canada Council Art Bank, Foreign Affairs Canada, the New Brunswick Art Bank and the Beaverbrook Art Gallery collection, as well as corporate and private collections.

Romeo Savoie, is an “action painter”, who mixes a plethora of media, and experiments constantly with mark-making.  He uses everything from earth and collected organic matter to more traditional acrylic paint in his works.  The result is a surface quality rich with texture and courageously abstracted forms.

Born in Moncton, and a former architect, Savoie became interested in painting in the late 1960s while on an exploratory trip to Europe, which consequently led to a two-year stay in Aix-en-Provence, France.  Since 1971, he has had more than 30 solo exhibitions, including a retrospective at the Beaverbrook Art Gallery in 2006.  His work is held in the collections of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, the Musée national des beaux-arts de Quebec, the Canadian Cultural Centre in Paris, the University of Moncton, the University of New Brunswick, and The Royal Bank and the National Bank of Canada, among others.