CHRISTIANE AINSLEY & LUCIE DUVAL

Inks

Opening Sunday September 21 from 2 p.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Lucie Duval and Christiane Ainsley are longtime friends. Over the past 35 years, they have shared several workshops while devoting themselves to their respective artistic careers.

Duval was at first living in France and Ainsley in Quebec, then vice versa! During all this time, if there was the slightest appearance of artistic competitiveness, it never darkened the beautiful complicity between the two friends.

Ainsley and Duval have kept in touch in their own unusual way. They began a correspondence not in words but instead using ink drawings, somewhat like a “cadavre exquis” – a collaborative drawing approach first used by Surrealist artists – a back-and-forth or rather a crossover between shapes, colors, gestures.

Thus the space of the exhibition hall is not divided but welcomes the two intertwined productions like a dialogue, or better still a pictorial narration, which plays with the classic spatial arrangement of the still life.

In this this proposal lies an antidote to times of uncertainty: bursts of joy in just doing!

Biographical notes

Ainsley studied painting and printmaking at the University du Québec in Montreal.
Working in the plastic arts workshops of the MACM (1992–1998) allowed her to experiment with a wide variety of techniques, which many artists no longer, or rarely, allow themselves. Since 2013, the result has been an abundant production of ceramic art.

Duval studied in France where she received the National Higher Diploma of Plastic Expression (DNSEP) with, notably, the congratulations of the members of the jury in 1983.
In her work she employs words, images and objects in creations that are both ironic and critical, where the visible and the legible confront each other, simulate and denounce, seduce and deceive. Since 2014, she has rediscovered the pleasure of composing with ink.