ALIBIS

Dunes is pleased to present ALIBIS, new paintings by the Los Angeles and New York based artist Strauss Bourque-LaFrance. Raised in Poland Spring, Maine, this is the artist’s first show in his home state.

Bourque-LaFrance’s paintings convey the occurrence of various gestures over time. Improvisational and searching, the artist transmits a desire to try several things at once, fusing drawing, painting and collage. Brushy underpainting creates structure for chromatic motifs; shapes are traced atop one another and vary in opacity and depth. Crisply-painted areas of Flashe, a vibrant acrylic paint used for theater sets, provide solidity and structure, only to be broken up by sketchy compositions that veer into representation. In this way Bourque-LaFrance embraces an inbetweenness, makes room for painting to be both read and felt, to be cryptic, camouflaged as well as plainly stated.

Landscape is suggested in the way Bourque-LaFrance divides up his canvases. Horizons anchor his compositions, semi-transparent washes of white create a foggy vista. Cheery yellow stripes might be a sail bobbing in the distance and orbs recall moon phases. However, layering bright solid shapes and pictographic marks, he steers the paintings away from being wistful or nostalgic. The ‘scapes he’s considering may not be as much Vacationland Maine as they are bumper to bumper traffic on the 405.

Spending more time in Los Angeles, starting several years ago, opened up his painterly vocabulary in terms of color and subject. Layering visual motifs from the city and nature, signage and foliage, paying attention to strange details or visual curiosities, and collating influences from abstract painting, design and domestic objects, he further iterates hybridity in his scenes. The titles of the paintings offer another read – poetic insights that support or complicate his formal decisions. Euphoric Calendar is grid-like, an accumulation of saturated, jewel-tone squares with zigzag annotations; Orphan Eclipses is a medley of color and marks – the words together don’t correspond to a celestial event but rather to something solitary like grief or a state of existential uncertainty.

With a background in dance and sculpture, Bourque-LaFrance’s experience making objects and performances feels embedded in these paintings. The larger works especially convey a linework that is choreographed or wrapped up in the gravity of a sculptural form (a set of hips or calves for example.) He worked in collage for several years: drawn to the way it offers a physical process of cutting and arranging, builds towards something unexpected or arrived at by chance via psychological impulse. The both/and of collage, its tender patching and violent finality appeals to him for its capacity to convey a range of emotions. Unraveling these former modes of engagement, the show’s title, ALIBIS, implies a safety in a personal truth, yet it's a subjective telling. Weaving in and out of self-imposed rules, Bourque-LaFrance moves fully present toward painting as a witness. -Emily Davidson