Why Bananart ?

Crystal Racine Gallery 1701 Gilford st Montreal
Director Crystal Racine - Assistant Stéphanie Laurin.
Crystal Racine Gallery, Contemporary Creation Site , welcomes the conceptual painting  proposed by artist Martin Boisvert.

Intervening simultaneously on the territories of surrealism, conceptual and gestual performance, this artist loves to put his art in the middle of the sensorial and the cerebral.
For Crystal Racine Gallery, he proposes a performane entitled BANANART complemented  with an exhibition of his latest painting.
 
CONCEPTUAL FIELDS
The unique esthetical experience that you will be a spectator of is initialy of Dalian inspiration. That artist, Salvator Dali, did realise a filmed performance where he painted on canvas with in lieu of a paint brush, he used a squid and it’s ink.
 
Painter Martin Boisvert instead utilises a banana peel, thus the performance’s title: BANANART.
Certainly his performance is of surrealistic inspiration, but the resulting art is more like from the New-York School, having the expressionism abstract pictorial characteristics of Action Painting. Everything points in that direction : the artistic attitude  that favors the physical act of painting, the speed of execution, the expressive gestual that eliminates all figurative suggestion…, the colors, the splashing.
The painting structure is the result  of artist intuition and also from the pigments behavior. Painting then appears like a pulsional esthetical existential moment. The art is witness of a living body in instant action.
 
From sensorial to cerebral
This Action Painting performance by Martin Boisvert, a faceoff between subject ( painter ) and object ( canvas ) primarily wants to show that modern art evolution through deconstruction is part of the artist self liberation process.
It’s the refusal of the ‘ painting is dead’ thesis, which holds that painting belong to the past because it’s inability to adequately express the absolute superiority of the cerebral over the sensorial. The painting esthetics always is the expression of it’s creator will power, his reflexions, his artistic decisions.
Martin Boisvert performance is a demonstration of that reality.
 
Bananart
                                                                                                                             
We dont’ go to school for nothing. 32 years after having seen in a documentary in art course Salvadotor Daly paint with a calamar as a paint brush, I told myself that banana skin, by it’s shape, was similar to a calamar.
 Of course, the banana depends on the painter’s energy and movements to make a painting. The calamar has the advantage to have it’s own ink and if alive, move. On the other hand, the banana is more docile.
 
Stamping and spreading
Stamping consist in printing surfaces or objects coated with paint on a canvas.
As for spreading, you paint with the paint filled object, sometimes on an already fresh paint filled canvas.
The use of a banana peel instead of the traditional paint brush offers the possibility of combining both technics.
 
Banana peel kinetics
The helical shape of the banana allows for dynamic and convincing moves.
It is like using 3 or four paintbrushes at the same time.