Sylvie Bouchard lives and works in Montreal. She studied visual arts at the University of Ottawa and has been active as painter since the early 1980s. She has been the recipient of numerous grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts. Her work has been presented in solo exhibitions at various venues, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2005), the Musée régional de Rimouski (1997) and the Southern Alberta Art Gallery in Lethbridge (1993). She has taken part in many group exhibitions across Canada and abroad. Her work is represented in a number of public collections, including those of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée régional de Rimouski, the National Bank of Canada in Montreal, the Royal Bank of Canada in Toronto and the Canada Council Art Bank, as well as in numerous private collections.
Artwork description
The artwork blends perfectly with the aerial space in the lobby of the Marcel-Giroux community centre, thanks to the trompe-l’oeil treatment of an architectural element that helps to create a direct relationship between the painting and the site.
The artist has produced a triptych the themes of which are landscape, the human figure, and the theatre. The work brings together images that amalgamate various registers of the pictorial tradition. For instance, the forest views become, in a sense, a refuge in which characters from the theatre world, here the commedia dell’arte character Gilles, generates a visual order that is not strictly narrative but also allegorical. The subject of a painting by Watteau titled Pierrot dit Le Gilles (1718), the character has historically symbolized melancholy. Portrayed here as a puppet, he references the transformative power of artistic creation.