DOMINIQUE PETRIN: "Pompéii MMXII," Jan. 16 to March 1, 2014, SNAP Gallery, Edmonton

×

1 of 2

Expand

Sebastien Lapointe

"Pompéii MMXII"

Dominique Petrin, "Pompéii MMXII," 2011, silkscreened paper, installation view at Centre Clark, Montreal.

×

2 of 2

Expand

Sebastien Lapointe

"Pompéii MMXII"

Dominique Petrin, "Pompéii MMXII," 2011, silkscreened paper, installation view at Centre Clark, Montreal.

Prev

Next

DOMINIQUE PETRIN: Pompéii MMXII

Jan. 16 to March 1

SNAP Gallery, Edmonton

By John K. Grande

Meticulous in the way she fills real physical space with bold scenic projections, Montreal artist Dominique Pétrin delights in compressing patterns and designs so they vibrate and clash with each other. For her show at the Edmonton gallery operated by the Society of Northern Alberta Print-artists, Pétrin has created an environment immersed in flat and 3-D silkscreened and sculptural scenarios that ornament and decorate, distancing and orchestrating space. As a visitor, one feels Pompéii MMXII is a precision-designed and controlled perceptual space.

There is humour in the way Pétrin transforms environments into eclectic scenarios that synthesize myriad styles from high kitsch to baroque. Pétrin’s enviro-wraps are not transparent like plastic wrap. Instead, they hyper-saturate the surfaces they take over with design patterns, classic Greco-Roman columns, zigzags, marbling, mosaics and sparkles. It all comes together as applied silkscreen wall art on places you would never expect to see imagistically altered. Hybridizing visual, architectural and graphic cues, Pétrin fills space, covers the surfaces of buildings and their interiors, whether public or private spaces, all with a compulsion to transmute the generic into something extraordinary. She merges styles, drawing on sources from other places, other times. Her art simultaneously speaks of the multi-source culture of our era. Earlier temporary projects include the Beaudry Metro station in Montreal, the Martha Street Studio in Winnipeg, and a Christo-and-Jeanne-Claude-like wrap of a Montreal building called The Catacombs, where Pétrin installed a neo-ancient Egyptian sphinx and mapped outer walls with a swirling mix of hieroglyphic abstract markings and extreme art-deco designs.

Occupying two entire walls at SNAP, this installation is a habitation from an imaginary world that lets us move through time, visualizing and wandering by association. The visual hints in this vivid interior, a territory achieved using silkscreen techniques to create a 3-D collage that looks strangely fresco-like, recall ancient Pompeii. The allusion to Pompeii likewise suggests a world frozen in time, a world rediscovered, or uncovered.

Inspired by music-hall performer and pianist Liberace, who died of AIDS-related illness in 1987, Pétrin’s Pompéii MMXII is a colour-saturated hybrid clash of eclectic styles. The play with cold, graphic grays and bright Pop neon is reminiscent of British painter Patrick Caulfield. Tensions are built in using colour and patterning, all orchestrated into a crescendo of chaotic design and surface effect. As Pétrin says, “Enhanced human cognitive processes, such as skewed perception or altered states of consciousness, are of utmost importance to my work. I consider silkscreening to be the ideal medium. It enables me to make use of bold lines and colours in order to create worlds that are vibrant and hypnotic.” Pétrin intensifies and manipulates the spaces she transforms, producing design-scapes of the mind. Her vocabulary is geometric, synthetic, ancient and contemporary, at one and the same time.