Yves Tessier - Cherry Picnic

September 12 - October 14, 2018

An unintentional, and often unexpected, purity of intention is at the core of Yves Tessier’s painting practice. Rendered with casein on aluminum panels, Tessier’s highly stylized paintings are the result of an extremely unique and personal artistic path, one which pays little, if any, attention to new fads and tides of visual expression in the art world- Tessier knows exactly how and what he wants to paint.

Cherry Picnic, Tessier’s second solo-exhibition with SHRINE, is a selection of recent paintings that quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) explore issues of gender, ethnicity, sexuality and current world politics. Seemingly mundane moments take on a gravity that is both thought-provoking and humorous, all with a focus on the disappearance of sociability and human interaction in the age of technological solitude. The figures and settings in Yves Tessier’s works lay on flat, completely matte planes to create surreal but plausible narratives that are expressions of moments we might not have experienced ourselves, but that we can still relate too despite their existence in disorienting worlds.

Yves Tessier (b. 1955) is a master of color, layering and pattern, who attends equally to both the negative and positive space in his compositions. His work reveals a deep attention to how modernity affects us all, with a keen eye for realism and the quirks of bodies frozen in time. Tessier’s paintings are visual representations of the stories we naturally yearn to create for the people we observe in passing everyday. In his hands, every person has an unusual and fantastical life that is unknown and hidden from the world at large.