Presenting Luce Meunier’s work in Paris represents a singular encounter for Sobering Galerie.
For more than twenty-five years, the Québec artist has developed a painting practice in which color is never simply a formal choice: it becomes the outcome of a process, a displacement, a change of state. Snow, water, temperature, gravity, and duration all participate directly in the making of the work. The artist sets the conditions, initiates the process, and then accepts that an essential part of what unfolds will remain beyond her control.
This approach profoundly shifts our relationship to painting. Luce Meunier does not simply apply color to a surface; she creates the conditions for its emergence. In certain series, pigment-infused snow is placed directly onto the canvas. It melts. The water carries the color, dispersing it, slowing its movement, or concentrating it. Matter follows its own laws. Time acts.
The work thus becomes the visible memory of an event that has disappeared.
When we look at the finished canvas, the snow is no longer there. The water has evaporated, the cold belongs to the past, the movement has ceased. Yet something of that transformation remains inscribed on the surface. A halo, a density, a boundary between two colors becomes the trace of a process the artist set in motion without seeking to control its every consequence.
Color is, for us, the most natural point of connection with Luce Meunier’s work. It has long held an essential place in Sobering Galerie’s program. Here, however, it behaves differently. It is precisely this tension that interests us: between control and surrender, between intention and phenomenon, color is not simply applied-it comes into being.
The works brought together in this exhibition explore this research through a wide range of forms. Débordement, Eaux de surface, Eau fossile, Dégel, and Mousse: the titles themselves evoke unstable states, processes in motion, and matter that circulates or changes form. The works on view combine, among other techniques, acrylic on cotton canvas and acrylic foam, reflecting the artist’s sustained attention to the behavior of materials.
At a time when our perception of seasons, temperature, and water has been profoundly altered, this practice takes on a particular resonance. The title Effervescence perfectly captures this state.
It speaks to the movement of matter, to emergence, inner agitation, and transformation.
We chose to present Luce Meunier because her work reminds us of something essential: painting can still be a space in which the artist does not fully impose her will upon the world, but instead accepts the need to work in dialogue with it.
Exhibition views: ©yann.bohac
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts. With the support of the Québec Government Office in Paris.
