For the upcoming exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Ed Pien has brought together a group of artists who all share a love for drawing. These five people come from diverse backgrounds and are at varying stages of their development. While each artist's style of work is quite different from each other’s, they are all figuratively based and suggest a sense of theatre and drama. Ultimately, the commonality found in their work is a sense of urgency: an urgency to make manifest arresting and enchanting images.
Oscar Camilo de las Flores makes carefully rendered and minutely detailed large-scale drawings. Populated with cavorting figures, these impossible microcosms parody and critique our own socio-political systems. Cinematic in approach, each passage of Christopher Lori’s intimate charcoal drawings evokes haunting, dream-like realms, both seductive and unsettling. Kim Moodie’s fine ink drawings record epic scenes in which both real and imaginary histories and mythologies are re-enacted. Roland Sohier takes a more autobiographical approach, often including himself among the cast of characters depicted. The complexity and potency of his work lie in the strange mix of playful humor with seemingly opposing, darker and more sinister elements.
Through his work, Ed Pien attempts to create a visceral journey into the conscious and unconscious worlds of reality and make-believe in order to make evident our subliminal vulnerabilities. Note that the participation of Roland Sohier, a senior artist of the Netherlands, who will be exhibiting his work for the first in North America is being supported the Royal Embassy of the Netherlands in Ottawa and the Prins Bernhard Cultuurfunds. - Fast Forward, Canadian Art Magazine
