It was through photography, getting interested in its way of slicing reality into fragments, its imprecisions, its shifting ground, its color always hypothetical, its insistence on time and memory, its supports, formats and finishes and, above all, the importance of light, that I discovered potential for painting.
A potential that reminds us that that which we believe captured escapes us, that that which we finish recommences, that that which we live is passing, that that in which we believe is only illusion and that which seems clear is only the obverse of obscurity.
Painting as the trajectory of making, the ingenuity of emptiness and time.
Angèle Verret by
Richard-Max Trembay
Angèle Verret was born in 1942 in Montréal where she taught art at the Université du Québec à Montréal from 1969 until 2002.
Since the mid-90's her painting has consistently taken account of the least accident in the surface of the canvas and the chances offered by the working process thereby creating images which question our ways of looking by their quasi-photographic quality.
Her works have been included in many solo exhibitions in Quebec, notably Moments aveugles, petites divisions du temps at the Saint-Hyacinthe Exhibition Center (2001); Co-incidence at the Exhibition Centre Plein sud in Longueuil (2003); and "au lieu" at the Galerie B-312 in Montreal (2003). Verret has also participated in numerous group shows including Peinture peinture, organised by the Association des galeries d'art contemporain de Montréal (2005); Surface sensible, presented at the Baie-Saint-Paul Exhibition Center (2004); and Avancer dans le brouillard, presented at the MusĂ©e national des beaux-arts in Quebec City (October 2004 to April 2005). Laureate of the Prix Graff in 2001, her works are to be seen in the collections of the MusĂ©e national des beaux-arts du QuĂ©bec as well as in the PrĂŞt d'œuvres d'arts Collection (MNBAQ); the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec; the Bibliothèque nationale du Canada; Loto-Québec, and in numerous private and corporate collections.
Angèle Verret is a Montreal-based artist.