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Interviews / January 23, 2020

Karine Fréchette

New and recent paintings by the Montreal artist translate the speed of everyday life into a suite of pulsing, rhythmic abstractions.
Karine Fréchette, <em>Wakes 4 (Still waiting news from the Event Horizon Telescope)</em>(detail), 2019. Karine Fréchette, Wakes 4 (Still waiting news from the Event Horizon Telescope)(detail), 2019.

From our Winter 2020 Preview section, which features conversations with artists and curators on upcoming projects.

Karine Fréchette: This exhibition is the closing of a chapter of works titled Wakes that began earlier this year. It’s a series about movement and the velocity of objects through space, about disturbing that flow. I work with an image bank—weather maps, for example—and you could say these paintings are inspired by digital images, but the sources are never direct. Instead, my compositions are spontaneous and fast, developed directly onto the canvas without sketches, so there’s an immediate relationship between the body and the space of the painting. I’m pretty obsessed with our addiction to movement and the different perceptive experiences that come with technology—it’s like the fleeting view from the window of a speeding train.  —As told to Bryne McLaughlin

A solo exhibition of works by Karine Fréchette is on view December 7, 2019, to January 25, 2020, at Galerie René Blouin.