A Pink Stain

Francine Savard makes paintings about painting. Rich in references to art history, its writings and its meanings, her monochrome canvases offer poetic approaches to formalism and conceptualism, playfully and thoughtfully turning the language of painting back onto itself. In the series "Un plein un vide", of which these canvases are a part, Savard has drawn inspiration from critical writings about Fernand Leduc, a member of the Quebecois Plasticien movement of the 1950s. Extracting descriptive words about the painter's work from the texts, she first matched the writer's imagery to forms found in his paintings, then enlarged them into her own similarly shaped canvases. Inscribing the writer's words back onto her canvases, she points to the limits of language to accurately describe art as she demonstrates the equally arbitrary nature of abstraction.