2025 | PIERRE DORION
CDMX
TORONTO
May 8 - June 21, 2025

Opening Reception : Thursday May 8, 6-8pm

**Pierre Dorion**, *Casa Gilardi IX*, 2024, Oil on linen canvas, 33 × 25 in.

This exhibition is the second part of a series of paintings that I have been working on since 2023. The first part was shown at Blouin Division in Montreal two years ago. The series comes from two trips I made to Mexico; one in February 2020, just before COVID, and the second in 2024. There, I discovered Mexican modern architecture, first with the Hotel where I was staying during both trips; the Camino Real, designed by Ricardo Legorreta, and then by visiting three residences designed by Luis Barragan: Casa Barragan, Casa Gilardi and Casa Pedregal. Following a long period where I made paintings that represented exhibition spaces, mostly contemporary “white cube” spaces, that were very austere, the experience of the architecture I saw in Mexico offered me the occasion to work with images imbued with very bright, saturated colours, which was something I had wanted to do for a long time. This architecture, especially Barragan, is also so pictorial that it made me feel I had to incorporate it into my practice immediately. The richness of the material I got in Mexico was so inspiring that once I started working from it, I knew it would take some time before I felt that I had exhausted all the possibilities offered. Therefore, after the first exhibition of these works in 2023 I knew I wanted to keep working with this material.

It was not the first time that I worked from photos I took during my travels, starting with Roman Images in 1995 that I did after an eight month stay In Rome. I guess there is always an affective link for me to these images of places that I visited. The results are paintings where memory and affect are filtered through my pictorial process in a way to offer another affective experience to the viewer, free for their interpretation.

For this show, in parallel to these recent CDMX paintings, I created a large grid of 36 “bichrome” paintings. I have been making similar pieces for the last 10 years. The paintings are abstract in nature and are usually on very small panels that are made up of leftover colors from my palette. This new grid began with a small collection of larger panels that were produced before I started to work on the CDMX series. Their colours are colder and reflect the paintings I was making then. I took this group as a starting point to create a large grid that, I find, has a Northern melancholic atmosphere. For me, it represents where I come from, both geographically and artistically. I wanted to show it with the Mexico series, along with a painting made from a photo I took 30 years ago that depicts a Quebec winter landscape. As much as it recalls works by historical Quebec artists like Jean-Paul Lemieux and Ozias Leduc, it also represents the place where I come from. I wanted to add these works to the show to create a counterpoint with the CDMX paintings, and have these two very different atmospheres cohabit the same show. - Pierre Dorion

Pierre Dorion - CDMX (Toronto 2025)