Whenever Forever
Whenever Forever invites looking and feeling through space and colour. In both her paintings and sculptural work, the artist uses contrasting colours, textures and spacial illusions throughout. Although decidedly abstract, components of the work are pulled from contemporary life: acidic and plastic colours from a digital and luminous world, isolated gestures that hover like logos or branding in space, organic forms that are neither real or representative but rather a hybrid shape of some sort.
Lefort explains, “The resulting work is what I refer to as an abstract-narrative where there is never a moment of complete knowing. Borrowing from many sources to finally create a space that doesn’t quite exist, the work can offer a space for speculation and fantasy, contemplation and projection. It is both pre-tech and post-virtual at once. To paraphrase the French philosopher Jacques Rancière－There are two fundamental lies: That which proclaims ‘I am saying the truth’ and that which states ‘I cannot say anything.'(1)”
Renowned Canadian painter and curator Leopold Plotek writes: “Jennifer Lefort’s canvases bring to mind the words of the distinguished poet Def Jef: ‘God made ’em funky!’ She is an artist whose work nearly grazes the form and spirit of popular media, and her colour would be inconceivable prior to the arrival of digital media or at the very least colour television. Saturated, electrified, her fields and often wiggy goings-on across them are finally pictorial, but not so much by things they represent (what are they, anyway?), as by pretending to creep, ooze, thump, pulse or pullulate; and all performed in rampant, chemical, often complementary hues. Her canvases present a striking contrast in luminosity and colour-temperature, and show how radically ground-colours can determine our perception of pictorial space.”
Jennifer Lefort’s work explores the open-ended potential of abstraction toward meaning, narrative, and the imaginary. In her paintings, she considers the coexistence and codependence of formalism and expressionism, color field and pattern, space within space, structure and disorder, accidents and intuition. These contrasting qualities take the viewer to a place of comfort and strangeness, beauty and disorder.
1. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster: Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation
About Jennifer Lefort
Jennifer Lefort’s abstract paintings practice garnered her the prestigious Joseph Plaskett Foundation Award in 2005. In recent years she has shown her work in several solo and group shows in Canada and internationally.
Of significant note are solo presentations at the New York and Basel VOLTA fairs, a temporary public artwork commission for the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides as well as solo exhibitions with Patrick Mikhail Gallery and at the Galerie UQO in Gatineau. Following a recently completed artist residency in Los Angeles, Lefort also has an upcoming exhibition in that city in 2017. Born in Montreal, artist currently lives in Gatineau.
