Ground Level
Is it a collage, a photograph, a painting? Or maybe all of them at once? If we observe carefully, clues lead us to believe that the starting point may be a three-dimensional space. To create those two works, David Elliott made a model in which he placed different images. He photographed his staging to finally reproduce it in painting in a hyper-realistic style that adds to the perceptual ambiguity. In a spirit close to surrealism, the artist offers us an association of images that does not seem to respect any narrative logic except that of the dream. A world in which it is completely normal for a butterfly to be bigger than an apple.
Born in Niagara-on-the-Lake in 1953, David Elliott has lived and worked in Montreal since 1977.Considered one of the leading Canadian painters to have participated in the revival of figuration in the late 1970s and early 1980s, David Elliott is perhaps best known for his large-scale oils on canvas which are part of the collections the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec.
DAVID ELLIOTT Chorus, 2011-2012 & Illumination, 2009
Oil on canvas