Clint Roenisch is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new sculpture, painting and drawings by Sylvain Bouthillette, a Montreal artist well known for the assertive message of spiritual growth and self-liberation in his work.
In a long profile for Canadian Art (entitled “The Ferocious Compassion of Sylvain Bouthillette”) James Campbell wrote: “Over the past two decades, his work has veered wildly between sculpture, prints, drawings, painting, audio installation and photography. In each medium, he works with a lively family of referents uniquely his own, migrating restlessly between low culture and high art, the sacred and the profane and the ultra-mundane, punk rock and so-called American-style ‘Bad Painting,’ Tibetan Buddhism and the distillation of creative high fever.” Works in the new exhibition concern the idea of interdependency among all things and the cultivation of resiliency (“understood here as the true development of courage”). Each One Teach One also concerns the Tibetan Buddhist idea of the wrathful deity: enlightened beings who take on wrathful forms in order to lead sentient beings to enlightenment.
Born in 1963 Sylvain Bouthillette took a Master’s degree in Visual Arts at Concordia University where he now teaches. He has exhibited or been collected by several institutions, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts; the Musee d’Art Contemporain de Montreal; the Mendel Art Gallery Saskatoon; Osler, Hoskin and Harcourt, TD Bank and the Musee de Quebec among others. A survey and catalogue, “Sylvain Bouthillette: Dharma Bum,” toured nationally from 2006 to 2008.
