The Leyton Gallery of Fine Art :: Denis Chiasson/title> <script type="text/javascript" src="../js/mootools.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../js/slimbox.js"></script> <script type="text/javascript" src="../js/rollover.js"></script> <link rel="stylesheet" href="../css/slimbox.css" type="text/css" media="screen" /> <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="../css/main.css" /> </head> <body> <center> <table width="1010" border="0" cellspace="5" cellpadding="5"> <tr><td colspan="2" bgcolor="#031634"><div id="header"> <table width="100%"> <tr><td width="426"> <img src="../img/logo.gif" alt="The Leyton Gallery of Fine Art logo" /> </td> <td align="right" valign="bottom"> <ul id="TopNavlist"> <li><a href="../index.html">Artists</a></li> <li><a href="../exhibition.html">Exhibitions</a></li> <li><a href="arrivals.html">Latest Arrivals</a></li> <li><a href="../contact.html">Contact Us</a></li> </ul> </td></tr></table> </div></td></tr> <td bgcolor="#eae4db" valign="top"> <table width="950" cellspacing="10"> <tr> <td colspan="2" valign="top"> <p><span class="artistName">Denis Chiasson</span></p> <p><b>Artist Review:</b></p> <p>Denis Chiasson: Desire </p> <p>For Denis Chiasson the act of painting is like drawing. It is just the artist Chiasson takes it further. These are colourful painting, human in spirit and the transpositions of very human feelings fill these paintings. Women populate Chiasson s paintings. They are in varying states of repose and reflection and they populate an idealized place, and themselves are ideal. The tableau is an island they all exist on, these women, these painterly scenarios, and we appreciate it all at a dream-like distance. The spirit is classical like a Cezanne.</p> <p>These paintings are full of atmospheres that are not atmospheric. These places are conceived, and as conceptions they are ideal, exist in no particular place. Yet they are very solid, decorative, like a lost language, written in the spirit of a 1950s Henry Miller novel, but done in another era that is less natural, in its expression, more de-naturized. Like images of art and industry from the post-war era, these paintings by Denis Chiasson build an ideology, for they grab their subjects in a populist, stylized, and decorative way. </p> <p>In the space of a single painting, every conceivable area is filled with details. The painting becomes a space that represents an inner world, a world that the artist fills up internally with sometimes melancholy, other times joyous reveries that are drawn from the ordinary world, and this is extraordinary, for it links Chiasson s painting with the Beats, with Jack Kerouac, for there is a certain sadness to the dream-like quality of these paintings. Each painting is pulled like a rabbit out of a hat, from an ongoing stream of unconscious associative elements that are always there. The women, the interiors, the animals &. The elements in a Denis Chiasson painting can be drawn from nature as witnessed by the birds, cats or pigeons, or from the artist s studio life as with the easel, or from travel, or numerous other aspects of life. </p> <p>It is as if all these women, and the accoutrements were integrated into a theatrical wheel of life, and the reverie co-exists with the ordinary. It is all life whether a dream or real, or both. And the beatific women are beautiful and omnipresent, even more than in real life. As idealized embodiments of abstract desire, sometimes real, other times dreams, they are there on paper or canvas. Denis Chiasson s paintings represent a desire that exists in the collective imagination, that is tangibly intangible, and these dreams are colourful, joyful, voluptuous, sad, vivid. A certain enduring naivete persists here, and a very folky spontaneity.</p> <p>- John K. Grande </p> <br> <p> </p> <p><a href="../denis_chaisson.html">Back to Denis Chiasson's artwork</a></p> </p></td> </tr> </table> </td> </tr> <tr><td colspan="2" bgcolor="#033649" height="25"> <font color="#ffffff" font-size="10px" font-family="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">© 2008 The Leyton Gallery of Fine Art</font> </td></tr> </table> </center> </body> </html>