<strong>Artist Statement  Gregory Montreuil 2017</strong>

I’m very interested in structure which is why I eliminate all extraneous compositional elements I could afford to jettison. I worked solely in black white and grey for many years but recently color has entered as an important structural element.  Working on either canvas or paper, the process resembles a wrestling match with the disparate elements thrown and forced into some kind of resolution. This may sound like a fairly ascetic process, but ultimately it’s quite freeing. No two works are ever alike in tone or emotion and the compositional possibilities are endless. What’s more, I can be in the moment, respecting the mark as it happens. It’s like having the decision-making process of a painting laid completely bare.

The lexicon of possible marks, too, seems endless. There are precise “strikes” of paint; crawling lines that change their thickness subtly, as they meander towards empty space; loaded brushmarks that start at the top of the surface full of pigment, then swoop down to nest or blend into each other-all of which I affect, thanks to a range of brushes I’ve grown attached to over the years. Generally I work quickly to establish the structure of the painting in the first secession; sometime later I go back to the work and amend, edit and sharpen the marks as needed. Affecting a sense of proportion and balance is very important to me.

That said, lately I’ve been using a wet-on wet working method. It is more daring and risky, (it creates a time constraint and is more difficult to alter). I do the latter works on stretched canvases, each titled and dated separately. I listen to snippets of conversation overheard in my travels which become open ended titles for my work. I’m always having a kind of dialogue, a conversation if you will, with chance and unpredictability in my works. Once the individual works are hung together, they’re able to have a larger, more concrete and tangible “conversation” with each other.

At this point, I should also note that I’m a published writer, (mostly of art criticism, for local weeklies and international monthlies), and that language plays a big part in how I see my world. It’s my desire to use my written criticism not to harshly deconstruct, so much as to open up a work of art to help people see and understand. Likewise, I also want to explore how verbal sounds resonate with my own work, particularly in their titles: “Just Wait,” “Who’s There,” “Four Times a Day,” “Make Me” - all are actual snippets of conversations I’ve overheard around me in the city or on the subway; some of them from one-sided cell phone conversations,. I write down these moments of open – ended conversation, because, like my painted work they seem so open to personal interpretation. These words sound really specific, and yet you can make of them what you wish. I like the notion that people are making up their own narratives to go with my abstract work.

Last year I visited Cezanne’s studio in Aix-en-Provence, and what I saw there has stayed with me ever since. It’s a beautiful space. Preserved intact, as if the master had just left and would be back any moment: his hat and coat on a hook, canvases ready in his backpack, the exact grey of the walls in the tone he'd chosen carefully for himself (Cezanne, saw the value of eliminating color when necessary, to see more clearly what he was trying to accomplish). Overall, the experience made me think: perhaps the real legacy an artist can leave behind is the here and now; a trace of the exact, and utterly subjective moment in which he lived.