About the Artist

Robert Lemay: What is Visible

Twenty years ago Robert Lemay was 23 years old and a recent graduate of the B.F.A. program at the University of Alberta.  He had begun a series of paintings that depicted a monochromatic balcony strewn with objects such as ashtrays, pop cans, wine bottles, woven lawn chairs and well-thumbed books on philosophy and Greek drama.  It was while painting these moody scenes that Rob received a call from Douglas Udell asking if he would care to show with him.  Doug would later say that this early work had reminded him of a young David Hockney or Eric Fischl.  In many ways, this twentieth anniversary show is as much the story of a relationship of an art dealer and an artist who have grown and developed together as it is about the evolution of the work. 

And the work has quietly and insistently grown and evolved, becoming richer and having greater depths even while it becomes simpler, cleaner. In recent shows, Rob has been exploring the use of drapery and its ability to capture, hold and infuse the image before it with light.  In this show he has moved to a darker background.  Inspired by baroque Spanish still lifes, such as those by Velazquez, Cotan, Zurbaran, Melendez, Goya and others, he has translated these into a 21st century idiom.  For example, his picture of hanging grapes is a nod to the similarly themed works of Juan Fernandez, El Labrador, c. 1620.  The lemons are a direct reference to paintings by Francisco de Zurburan.  His cantaloupe relates to the Juan Sanchez Cotan painting that many will remember as the ‘poster piece’ for the Spanish Still Life show that took place in London, England in 1995.  As well, the flower paintings reference the many great floral painters of the baroque era.   

In his essay on the still lifes of Zurburan, John Berger notes that “What is visible has been placed on the very edge of this darkness, as if somehow the visible has come through the darkness like a message.” By putting the emphasis on what is visible in this show, Rob has illuminated both the connections his work has to the past, and also casts a contemporary light on what is sacred in our daily lives.  

 The flowers in his still lifes have all been grown in his own garden.  By placing them at the edge of darkness, he has been able to illuminate them as individual personalities, to paint them as one might paint a portrait.  Standing before the flower pictures, one finds oneself relating to them in many ways at once.  First, they might vividly evoke all sorts of personal memories that will always attach to particular flowers.  Then one might recall any number of flower paintings from the history of art.  One might also consider, for example, a lily as a sacred object.  The darkness might be seen as the chaos from which the message of the flower emerges.  On Zurburan’s dark background, Berger says, “the blackness represents the world into which we have been thrown like salt into water.”  The incredible balance which the paintings maintain between the depths of blackness and the secret light of the flowers is a world into which the viewer can settle –  rapturously, quietly, secretly.