Weekly Shot of Art - Martin Brouillette

There is something wildly cleansing and cathartic about being caught out in a rainstorm. Imagine then, being caught out in a rainstorm and ducking in to the Waterfall Gallery for shelter - a pyramid-shaped glass building with water cascading down all around it. Then imagine Martin Brouillette's show, "Healing" come into focus in front of you. Deeply evocative paintings of otherwise ordinary people with crude angel wings painted on or gouged out of the wood in jagged lines around them. But these aren't your run-of-the-mill Hallmark angels - their body language clearly indicates suffering, agony and distress. One's camoflage pants in La Tentation de Deserter (above) signifies a man of war. Several have their eyes censored out or written "thoughts" spilling out into the space around them.

The title of the exhibit, "Healing" grabs hold on a number of layers here. Brouillette has invoked the angel as a metaphor for strength and courage and goodness, and melded it to suffering human forms to show how badly these people - our culture - is in need of healing. Peace is as awkward and childish to us as these wings are to the figures. The symbol of the angel bridges the gap between ordinary people, who may find it hard to heal and to be courageous, and the supernatural strength of the ideal.

Painted on board, and mixed with text and images from magazines, the images are distressed with knives and scissors and then smoothed over with glossy epoxy resin to "heal" the art. All the cracks are filled in and the end result is a hard protective casing. Brouillette, living and working in Quebec, also says that this has personally been a healing process for him.

Normally I am not so fond of art with a message that hits home as hard as this one. Especially one that has been as overdone as the angel. But Brouillette is a master. He mixes message and power and emotion without holding back any of himself and that seems to be the key. Because it works. It works so well that I wanted to spend the entire afternoon sitting on the floor of the gallery staring.

One piece unlike any of the others in the show. It is thematically tied to the angels, but instead of a painting, is is a huge white angelic wingspan made out of shellaqued pills glued together and mounted on steel. I admit it made me instantly think of the Philadelphia Cream Cheese commericals and I didn't like it there at all, so I circled around it warily, only coming back to it when I'd been past every painting twice. In addition to the 3D pill sculpture is an audio/video component, and putting on the headphones, my head was flooded with an angsty, pounding NIN type song. The pulse and volume mounted steadily and filled me with fear and sadness and agony and distress and all the while words flashed on the video screen to augment that sensation (PAIN, SUFFERING, POVERTY, etc). I left the headset on until I could feel myself doubling over like the figures in the paintings, the distress having physically manifested itself in less than a minute. When the sound stopped, I found that I was standing staring through the angel wings, listening only to the sound of the rain. Healed.

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Elliott Louis Gallery
The Waterfall Building
1540 West 2nd Avenue
604-736-3282
gallery@elliottlouis.com
www.elliottlouis.com

Images are (above) a detail of La Tentation de Deserter and Untitled 96, courtesy of the gallery.