Thinkspace enters the Dream World of Jacub Gagnon, a Toronto-based artist known for meticulous detail and realism within his luminous acrylic paintings. The artist explores unlikely combinations of flora and fauna depicted in imaginative scenarios, creating a world in which nature and fantasy collide.
Gagnon creates symbolic amalgams to remind us of the ultimate fragility balancing a sustainable and natural world. The artist often deploys contrasting light-and-dark hues set against dark-black or stark white backgrounds to amplify the effect. Using a minute brush, Gagnon constructs surfaces with illustrative clarity and precision while the imagery’s technical realism, usually shrouded in negative black space, contributes to the surreal impact of his poetic visual puns.
With a playful interest in freedom of the absurd, Gagnon creates imagistic connections to explore the intersection of human and natural elements. These ideas of interconnectivity and associative interpretation are vital to the artist’s philosophical approach. By connecting unlikely and disparate elements, we find different readings, alternative possibilities, and new realizations woven into each piece, desensitizing our acclimated reception of the familiar. Gagnon revitalizes our perception of nature and inspires us to look again, stirring a sense of wonder in this time of suspended disbelief. The natural world is cast in artificial light and pushed to the point of the implausibly surreal.
Narrative plays a significant role in Dream World, as Gagnon often draws inspiration from language to visualize the latency of new meanings and associations. A natural world, freed from restriction by natural law, produces unlikely poetry. In this space of disconnection and re-imagination, the artist proposes new morphologies, collusions, losses, and fictions in an endlessly potent space of transformation and renewal.
Jacub Gagnon's Dream World debuts at Thinkspace on June 29th, with an opening reception from 6 to 9 pm, and is on view through July 20, 2019.
