Tétreault showed self-portraits exclusively. Loose-painterly in a manner to include the occasional discordant slash of colour -- several images of ‘self’ evaded any easy ‘traditional / historical’ classification of portraiture. Far in time and spirit from the ‘classical’ Greek narcissus, void of any semblance of psychological introspection (e.g. Durer, Rembrandt, Van Gogh, ...), and [almost] totally avoiding the the oft-contradictory concept of the P-M “recentered ‘I’ “ (too-easily defined as: ‘a realization of a reality of alienation’ juxtaposed to a futile wish for a ‘meaningful relocation’), the viewer was cast into uncertain waters ... The artist’s principal oeuvre -- THE KILL, 2006, did ‘touch’ upon aspects of “recentering” , if only superficially so. A near-life-scale, auto-portrait of the artist, clad in undergarments -- antique, flintlock rifle in-hand -- stood bold in front of an empty ground -- empty, expect for the magnificent (dead) peacock at the hunter’s feet [thinking mythologically -- at Diana’s feet ]. ... [or, was the artist killing-off NBC’s Pop-culture icon? the alchemist’s plume? ... a conventional acceptance of ‘beauty’? ] ... The flat-painted black garments and hair, the amorphous background, the casual ‘quick-grounding’ tach of shadow at matador-slippered heels, and the nonchalant stare directed towards the viewer [read: “what are you looking at !”] whispered of Manet. The much empty, upper-left space of THE KILL begged for a revisit to Titian’s concept of ‘occult balance’ ... but then ‘off-balance’ may very well be the pointed-message -- socially-speaking -- of the project -- was Tétreault hinting at the urgency for a ‘peek’ / ‘glance’ into the reality of current-day ‘youthful’ disenfranchisement?
Cenedese largely replaced representational imagery with the passionate embrace of relatively extreme degrees of abstraction, painterly freedom and intuitive process. An ambitious body of small- and medium- scaled, mixed-media on canvas works offered complex-layered and sensuous surfaces, somehow ‘eloquent’ despite a much-reserved use of pigment and the introduction of throwaway materials. Smudge upon veil, drip over splatter, matte vs. shiny, tarry beside cracked, char-blacks splashed in cream-white, ... Cenedese’s compositions were defiant of ‘most’ aesthetic conventions and conflictual in formal consideration. The artist ‘spontaneously’ manufactured her painting surfaces as though they were ‘ghost - memory’ studies of rough, sometimes heavy / other times ethereal, timeworn, weather -scarred ‘walls’ -- walls of insidious charm evincing a sensibility shared by Tachist-, Arte Povera-, and ‘New Image’- artists (not to mention Leonardo centuries before them). ... There was something in the ‘reflection’ of a world, rich in the ‘beauty’ of decay or destruction, that offered a poetically charged resonance where a sense of the age-old opposites of energy and matter met. [...] When Cenedese did work in a more representational mode, her paintings were filled with wit or ‘inverted’ cliché. Witness the tiny canvas entitled “Le secret”, 2006 -- the stylized, line-drawing of a hummingbird hovered poised to decorticate the image of a human head bedecked in shredded strips of discarded, newspaper article -- think of the inversion: “thought for food”.
Tétreault, tall, fresh-blushed in cheek, and casual in attire / Cenedese, elegant in classical, little-black-dress and heels, gracefully co-hosted “Arrière-Pensées”. [... ] And a bright, complementing and contrasting spectacle of painting ‘wowed’ the viewer.
T.L. Mtl. 2007
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