Mathieu Laca Makes Pretty Ugly Art

Visual Arts•

Mathieu Laca Makes Pretty Ugly Art

More : "Pretty Ugly Art", Mathieu Laca, Ottawa Gay Art, Peter John Mills Gallery

by 2B site Webmaster on June 30, 2011

The upcoming exhibition Pretty Ugly Art at the Patrick John Mills Gallery will try and show how profound beauty is and how far it is from “superficial prettiness,” and their poster boy is daring young painter Mathieu Laca.

“He has no fear. Paints balls to the wall. He is doing incredible paintings,” says gallerist Patrick John Mills. “He is what Canada needs in Art,” adds Mills, who has exhibited Laca’s cartoonish and seemingly garish paintings every month since he appeared in the gallery’s I Killed the Group of Seven group show last fall. The curatorial statement for Pretty Ugly Art is more like a series of questions, asking viewers to think about how beauty is tied to “moral values and isn’t standardized in any way.” The show has taken a quip from Paul Gauguin as their slogan that sums it up: The ugly can be beautiful, the pretty, never.

“At first glance, the resulting works may be frightening or disturbing, yes, even ugly but with exposure comes understanding and this selection of art, will by comparison, render all wall decoration totally dull,” Laca and Mills assert.

Pinocchia by Mathieu Laca

Mathieu Laca’s paintings are large, brightly coloured, and highly sexualized iconic reworkings of pseudo-mythical themes. At first glance, works like “Otherness” and “Pinocchia” seem grotesquely sexual and bizarre. Combining religious imagery of angels, nuns, and ceremonial masks with the folk-art elements of ithyphallic icons—with erect penises, animal heads, or both—Laca invites us into a fleshy, fun, fuckable world that is some kind of cross between Pierre et Gilles, and Francis Bacon. “We are immediately shocked, surprised and then seduced by the truth of the situation, the strength of the execution, the bravado of the subject matter and the obviousness of talent,” writes art critic Mustapha Chelbi of Laca’s work.

There will be a team a half dozen artists accompanying Laca in the Pretty Ugly Art show, which Patrick John Mills is promoting with his minimalist poster-bombing of downtown Ottawa. Mills is a hands-on kind of gallery-owner, looking to show emerging, more affordable visual art in the small but titillating Ottawa scene. He recently made a call-out for LGBT artists for a group he’ll be curating in the fall, which you can check out at http://www.patrickjohnmills.ca/GAYART.htm

Pretty Ugly Art featuring works by Mathieu Laca is up at Patrick John Mills Contemporary Fine Art Gallery, July 7-30, 2011
286 Hinchey Ave. Ottawa, Ontario, Canada, K1Y 1M2, Tel: (613) 729-0406
Opening Hours: Thursday – Saturday, 12 – 5 pm, or by appointment.
http://www.patrickjohnmills.ca

And for more on Mathiew Laca: www.mathieulaca.com

Meet the Artists: Thursday July 7th. 6 – 9 pm (First Thursdays Art Walks)

Participating Artists: Lilly Butter, Taz Fletcher, Mathieu Laca, Michèle LeCourtois, Patrick John Mills, Bruce Stewart, Juan Manuel Vasquez, Shannon Lee Mannion, Lorena Ziraldo and more.

Facebook Event Page: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=180291205327721