MERGING STREAMS

Simard Bilodeau Contemporary is honored to present Merging Streams, a collection of works from artists Thai Mainhard, Marcel Rozek, and Thorbjørn Bechmann. 

In their work, Mainhard, Rozek, and Bechmann harness their innate creativity through varying degrees of abstraction and improvisation. Rooted in a process-based approach, each artist embraces intuitive freedom, letting go of preconceived outcomes, by instead responding to impulse and the spontaneity of the moment to produce color-saturated, immersive paintings free from the restraints of literal representation and logical, linear thinking.

Indeed, rather than being inert entities, the works in the exhibition appear to be in a perpetual state of motion and transformation. Exploring the tension of life’s constant change and transience, Thai Mainhard’s mixed-media compositions are born from an intuitive process in which she converts her immediate experience into abstracted, brightly colored marks on the canvas. Interposing bursts of vivid color with an array of organic shapes, Mainhard utilizes her work as a means of processing complex emotions, creating a place of refuge from the tension and uncertainty of everyday life.

Gravity, gesture, and the unpredictable, fluid nature of paint lie at the heart of Bechmann and Rozek’s creative process. Pouring solvent-diluted oil paint over large areas of unprimed canvas inclined on the ground, Marcel Rozek allows layers of vibrant pigment to spill, pool, stain, and blend over one another: the result is a kind of dimensionality expressed by color rather than light or shadow, alternating from richly pigmented forms to translucent washes of paint, that simultaneously invoke the inner world of the artist, while also prompting the viewer to look within.

Physicality and material processes are also at the heart of Thorbjørn Bechmann’s art: battling with both the paint and canvas, he strives to cleanse the pictorial field of visual markers, creating a meditative expanse of iridescent pigment that appears to exist in a liminal space between dream and reality. For Bechmann, art is not a mirror of the self. His artworks are always in a state of evolution – they are never final or fixed - transcending identity, time, and space.

Celebrating the richness and diversity of the human impulse to create, communicate and make sense of the world, Merging Streams brings together artists that respond to the ebb and flow of creativity by embracing spontaneity, intuition, and presence. Like rivers, their artworks are also not static, fixed entities: they are in a constant state of flux, engaged in a shifting, wordless dialogue between artist, artwork, and viewer.

View Available Works on Artsy