Magalie Comeau “New & Recent Paintings”

Mitchell Algus Gallery

[Image: Magalie Comeau "Prolongement des compossibles en surgissement" (2016) oil on canvas, 60 x 60 in.]

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The Mitchell Algus Gallery presents new and recent paintings by Magalie Comeau opening on Saturday, November 3. The current show is Ms. Comeau’s first one-person exhibition outside of Canada. A reception for the artist will be held from 6 to 8 pm on the day of the opening.

Magalie Comeau (b. St-Gabriel, Quebec, 1982) makes allusive, meticulously painted abstractions that explore the intersection of the ethereal and the corporeal, of atmosphere and architecture. Her paintings are unlike anything now being shown in New York and serve as salve to the efflorescence of expressionist, often déclassé, figuration now in vogue. Conjuring science fiction and surrealism, minimalism and field painting, Comeau’s art presents something newly other: vaporous, concrete, fleeting and perennial.

With their scrupulous light infused surfaces Magalie Comeau’s paintings evoke photographic images, not because of their lifelike exactitude, but by virtue of the artist’s ability to convey in oil paint a precise tactual representation of light and dark in abeyance of specific objects. In certain ways Comeau’s work aligns with photographers and new media artists like Eileen Qinlan, Lisa Oppenheim, Liz Deschenes and Cory Archangel where process and misperception generate sui generis image worlds.

Magalie Comeau’s art also bears affinities with the tantalizing, dark, sometimes occult, often visionary, spirituality of painters like Jacqueline Lamba, Jay DeFeo, Cameron and Deborah Remington. Each of these women has created a uniquely chimerical abstraction informed by female identity.

The artist’s work has been included along with that of Cajsa von Zeipel, Anna Uddenberg, Tillman Kaiser and Betty Tompkins in the gallery’s 2015 group show The Description of a New World, called The Blazing World, based on Margaret Cavendish’s pioneering 16th Century protofeminist, proto-science fiction fable. Comeau’s paintings were also included Sunlight arrives only at its proper hour at 356 Mission in Los Angeles in 2017 and this past January in 25 Years: Abstraction exhibiting notable work shown by the gallery since it opened in 1992.

Magalie Comeau lives and works in Montreal, Quebec where she exhibits with Galerie Art-Mûr. Her work is in numerous public and private Canadian collections including that of the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Quebec.