For half a century, Aquitaine and Quebec have had a political will for cooperation and the sharing of skills in various fields, including that of culture.

Since 2003, Zébra3 has built a lasting relationship with Quebec through the establishment of creative residencies.

In 2011-2012, the Clark art center and the Zébra3 association set up cross cultural exchanges between Bordeaux and Montreal. These exchanges, renewed in 2014, will give rise to the co-production of two creative residencies and two exhibitions.

Julie Trudel , Quebec artist, was selected to carry out an 8-week creative residency at Zébra3 in Bordeaux.

In her practice of abstract painting, Julie Trudel focuses on color in its material dimension, seeking to present it in a new form. In the workshop, she develops protocols and imposes certain constraints on herself, which will serve as a springboard for innovation. She thus wishes to exploit all the perceptual complexity generated by the painting, which challenges us with its visual effect, its quality of object and its manufacturing process as obvious as it is enigmatic.

The exhibition brings together a body of large-format paintings created in residence at Zébra3. This series was produced exclusively with ivory black and titanium white pigments, diluted with a lot of acrylic medium to make them translucent. Stimulated by the difficulty of this constraint, the artist tried to bring out an intense visual depth, which goes beyond simple gray. On black or white panels, the superposition of a layer of liquid color makes very particular black, brown and gray tones emerge by transparency. A pattern of dots followed by streaks testifies to the movement of the painting on a flexible plexiglass support which has been bent. Several contradictory movements can coexist within the same painting. The result is a body of work that is both simple and complex, optical and material, controlled and unpredictable.

http://www.julietrudel.ca