Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is pleased to present Long Drop: A Hanging, he MFA thesis exhibition of Dil Hildebrand from March 1 to April 5, 2008. In parallel, new gallery artist Isabelle Hayeur will exhibit two videos, Vertige (2000) and Si jamais la mer (1998), in the gallery's video room.
LONG DROP: A HANGING
In scenography shorthand, drop refers to the painted backdrop that hangs behind theatrical scenery. In a play of words, the title alludes also to the long drop method of human execution and to the hanging of paintings as an analogous public spectacle.
At first glance, one might look at the paintings of Dil Hildebrand and surmise that they are driven by a sort of photo-synthesis - that while the handling of materials may leave little doubt that these works are painted, an apparent fidelity to photographic representation arrests them upon the line in between. This conflation of painting with photography can make for fairly peculiar images, particularly where the boundless reverie of the impossible is made to wear the sheep’s clothing of the possible.
Though romantically inspired landscapes figure in nearly every painting and drawing, it becomes gradually more clear while pondering Hildebrand’s entire oeuvre that a concern for the act of representation and of looking is generating these images. In a sense, his fragments of nature, whether on canvas or paper, serve as backdrops for a painting practice as well as backdrops for a discussion on the self-locating principles of perception. While in some instances painterly abstraction is used to disrupt a bid for photographic realism, examples in other paintings reveal a clear intent to mime the photograph and to call into question its claim to the real, exposing it as just another trick of the eye.
Through a broad range of techniques, including collage and trompe l'oeil, Hildebrand tinkers with the conventions of landscape imagery with technical ingenuity and conceptual intuition and care. History and memory trace an oneiric path through his multiple approaches, incorporating various traditions such as Romanticism, Cubism and Surrealism. The influence of theatrical scenography – a field in which Hildebrand worked for nearly 10 years - infuses his canvases with an enigmatic false reality. In certain large canvases such as Swamp and Descending, the pictures themselves depict a theatrical stage, of sorts. To look upon others, such as The View, one cannot help but feel pulled onto an absent metafictional stage. The surfaces of his works facilitate this fiction; often feigning the ambient reflections of a gallery in which the work ostensibly hangs, or in featuring dollops of thick paint rendered as transparent water droplets, his surfaces openly represent the “fourth wall” of traditional theatre, separating scene from seers.
Born in Winnipeg and living currently in Montréal, Hildebrand works in a range of media, including oil and acrylic paint, and charcoal.
