David Elliott Peintures
OBORO
The rediscovery of painting in the 1980s was a great relief for me and others of my generation. We have returned to it full energy but also with some awkwardness and difficulty. Acquiring the illusionistic skills of painting, largely from books and through trial and error, has been the strange training ground for many of us. The critic Robert Hughes bemoans the superficiality of this method and likens it to telephone sex. There is something cheap and charade-like about it, but that is part of the point. One of the most entertaining aspects of this enterprise has been to watch artists learn how to paint. If the delights and mystery of painting have always been its deceitful attempt to be something that it is not, in our time, this endeavour has taken on qualities of the burlesque.
My work is overloaded with imagery; piles of stuff, enthusiastically thrown together, like a teenager’s bedroom. It may occasionally be embarrassing but it is also disarmingly frank about its intention to reclaim something that seemed to have disappeared – painting as a unique kind of theatre. (…) More specifically, these paintings are about my friends and my family; about love, sex and having children. The repertoire of birds, boats, cats, clowns, candles, embracing couples and stars in the sky is meant to bring pleasure. It is also a way of asking whether we are too jaded to respond to the sentimental. The mixture of carnival sideshow (Simpleton, Mr. Soul) and religious tone (Big Idea, Two Angels) is the mixture that painting has always had for me: delight and deception on the one hand and a source of faith and hope on the other.
OBORO
David Elliott was born in 1953 at Niagara-on-the-Lake (Ontario). He has lived in Montreal since 1977 and is presently teaching painting at Champlain College in St-Lambert. The Museum of Modern Art of Mexico recently presented a solo exhibition of his work.