Some Atomic Love is about to detonate at the Two Rivers Gallery.
Dan Brault is a painter from Québec City where he has been featured as a solo artist at facilities like Galerie Laroche-Joncas and part of profiled group shows at Galerie 3 and the 100 Painters Of Tomorrow exhibition in New York that was also a book (Brault was one of only two Canadians to make that list).
He has been featured in Quebec media through channels like La Presse newspaper, Radio-Canada/CBC and Vie Des Arts Magazine.
Despite his works being displayed in the United States, Mexico, Brazil, Belgium and the United Arab Emirates, Brault has never exhibited in Western Canada before. Two Rivers Gallery chief curator George Harris is making Prince George Brault's debut on this side of the nation.
"He's said to me that he really gets down easily when he hears things in the news about the troubles in the world," Harris said. "Instead of letting that weigh him down, he decided to use that as a counterpoint to focus on things that give him pleasure and joy and offset those darker feelings."
The show is entitled Atomic Love and it's an explosion of images and paint splashes. Each painting seemingly flies at the eye like shrapnel blown by a bomb. There is a collage effect and a graffiti effect to his brash mash of colours and non-sequiturs.
Harris cautioned that these paintings might seem to be flippant fragments, but Brault is a fastidious and schooled artist. He received his bachelor's degree in visual arts from Concordia University followed by a master's degree from Laval University.
"In the end, his artwork is specifically designed to be an antidote - light reflections of things in his life that he's fond of," Harris said. "Presumably, we all have things in our lives we feel affections for, so this is artwork to make us think about that and appreciate what pleasures we should feel grateful for and keep some perspective on the world."
It's a counterintuitive act, to recognize your biggest emotions and strongest opinions, then turn your back on them. Harris said Brault explained himself to be "a self-professed cynic" but none of that was evident in painting after painting. Pop-art calls out for cynicism, yet this painter makes a point of eschewing it.
"Issues like climate change and environmental decline are more than simply absent in his paintings," Harris said. "He carefully composes his work to counter the anxiety and malcontent these and other concerns cause. Using a range of painting techniques and media he fashions paintings that, while autobiographical, draw from common experiences in the world around him. Fishing, camping and video games are among the subject matter that Brault tackles lending his work a wide-ranging resonance as he creates paintings that are uplifting antidotes to these troubled times."
Atomic Love blows up at the gallery on July 20 and will continue on exhibit until Oct. 7.
