Andrée LaRoche

“The painter Andrée LaRoche opens a unique dialogue with Nature by borrowing the artistic movement of the Automatist family, which reconnects the pure expression of feeling in connection with a more subtle reality. The painter's plastic influences are rooted in the work of masters such as Borduas, Riopelle and Marcelle Ferron.

In this work, clarity and color bring out the essence of the forms in their contrast, constantly reintroduced by sequential layers of hues whose fluidity of volumes imposes a rhythmic and vast gesture, specific to Andrée.

The artist structures her work with a knife. She paints large, open, non-figurative perspectives that, for the most part, are souvenir traces. The landscape is the very essence of the research. Through this sensitivity to places of exploration, Andrée invites us to perceive what is beyond the visible while remaining focused on the shapes and colors of the landscape. All in nuance, the colors are born in their opposite, a juxtaposition of hues gives momentum, the lines affirm the character of the volumes, vast in some places, concentrated in others; this rhythmic momentum announces a symphony of shapes and colors through flat areas with a spatula.

Sometimes, an obvious fact, a sign, a resonance with the perceived image, a deliberate drawing of a tree, a branch, invites the gaze to go beyond this visual equivalence to transport us into the feeling. This rhythm so singular to Andrée LaRoche is punctuated by the seasons, by the variation of light which probes the intuitive memory revisited during walks in nature. In this exploration, the essence of the research is related to the plant kingdom, but not only, because connecting the verticals of the landscape with the sky, brings these open spaces to a composition in a sort of optical illusion in which each chosen color has a symbolic meaning with nature.

In this landscape architecture, the metamorphosis is unpredictable and marvelous, each work is crossed by immense skies. The artist composes variations on the same themes with authenticity and extraordinary emotion.

As Jean-Paul Riopelle said: "When you sit down in front of a blank canvas to paint, you deny all the canvases you've done before. Otherwise, what's the point?"

Andrée's spontaneous and generous work, through its language and colors, sets the tone for this quote. There is no repetition in the research; her work combines the balance of celestial and plant forces, clouds, skies, movement in the foliage, light, all these components amplify the feeling like visual poems and invitations to go beyond the visible.”