Antoine Lortie

Antoine Lortie’s paintings gather a rich accumulation, even a surfeit of patterns. Like our cosmopolitan and dizzyingly complex modern world, the artist’s visual universe must be read in multiple layers. Images must be pulled apart, to isolate the individual elements and tease out groups of ideas that, together, depict a quest for meaning and identity, themes at the very core of our contemporary society, straddling history, our present moment, and the forsaken promise of progress.

Lortie’s work may be slow to reveal their resilient intent, but they draw us in with colours, a dichotomy that echoes the work’s meaning. Shrivelled, anonymous, androgynous bodies take us on a voyage where mythological quest and surrealism are the order of the day.