Dil Hildebrand: E Unibus Pluram
13 Apr - 27 May 2017
Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain is proud to present new paintings by Dil Hildebrand. This new body of work brings a more physical presence to the layers and depth of Hildebrand’s work. His continued advancement and research of media and formats in painting has solidified his place as one of Canada’s most interesting contemporary artists.
Hildebrand's body of work blends a diversity of references and methods, from modernist strategies of fragmentation and re-composition, pictorial tropes of Western art and theatre, to Photoshop and modernist architecture. Lying on the shifting border between spatial representation and abstraction, Hildebrand's paintings explore the mechanics of representation. This exciting new series investigates the twofold nature of the artwork as both an image and object, enacting a negotiation between highly physical surfaces and deep pictorial space.
For this exhibition, Hildebrand has selected the title E Unibus Pluram, drawn from David Foster Wallace's essay of the same name. Translated as "Out of one, many", the Latin phrase is a play on the American motto E Pluribus Unum - "From many, one." Wallace coins the phrase to describe the TV-watching public: individuals sitting alone at home, collectively watching television.
Hildebrand uses the author's characterization - befitting for the internet age as the ubiquity of electronic screens has muddled the distinction between individual and collective experience - to describe the process by which the paintings are made:
These new paintings are akin to screens, and it seemed to me that there was an interesting reversal in Wallace's invented phrase that echoed the work. The paintings are made on clear acrylic panels, both by adding and removing paint with a glass scraper. The layers are mixed and matched, superimposed on one other, and traded between paintings to result in aggregate images, each comprising several individual layers. In this way, they are devised collectively rather than individually.
Hildebrand's body of work blends a diversity of references and methods, from modernist strategies of fragmentation and re-composition, pictorial tropes of Western art and theatre, to Photoshop and modernist architecture. Lying on the shifting border between spatial representation and abstraction, Hildebrand's paintings explore the mechanics of representation. This exciting new series investigates the twofold nature of the artwork as both an image and object, enacting a negotiation between highly physical surfaces and deep pictorial space.
For this exhibition, Hildebrand has selected the title E Unibus Pluram, drawn from David Foster Wallace's essay of the same name. Translated as "Out of one, many", the Latin phrase is a play on the American motto E Pluribus Unum - "From many, one." Wallace coins the phrase to describe the TV-watching public: individuals sitting alone at home, collectively watching television.
Hildebrand uses the author's characterization - befitting for the internet age as the ubiquity of electronic screens has muddled the distinction between individual and collective experience - to describe the process by which the paintings are made:
These new paintings are akin to screens, and it seemed to me that there was an interesting reversal in Wallace's invented phrase that echoed the work. The paintings are made on clear acrylic panels, both by adding and removing paint with a glass scraper. The layers are mixed and matched, superimposed on one other, and traded between paintings to result in aggregate images, each comprising several individual layers. In this way, they are devised collectively rather than individually.