Répétition

Richard Pilon

September 2015

The exhibition, Répétition, features a selection of drawings on paper by French-Canadian artist, Richard Pilon. Created over the past eight years, Pilon’s works are small in scale and drawn exclusively with coloured pencils. He uses only twenty-four colours, six of which are shades of grey.

Inspired by found objects such as pebbles, nuts, tree bark, and bits of wood or metal, Pilon reproduces these objects on a square picture plane which he often divides into a grid. Small, repetitive pencil strokes underscore the introspective moments Pilon experiences while creating his compositions. His subdued palette crafts an ethereal quality emphasizing transparency of light and shadow. Within the subtle value treatment, organic shapes and gently-blended lines begin to emerge. Occasionally, Pilon abandons the grid to accentuate the form of the object, such as in his drawings of stones, each a precious gem found on the shores of Newfoundland.

In his current work, the grid not only structures the drawing; it becomes a physical point of reference and the subject itself. The allusion to nature recedes into the background. Instead, an image of a cardboard divider from an auto parts box becomes the organizing structure through which memory is considered. Here, memories are stored, but it is also where their absence is felt.

Born in Montreal, Richard Pilon now lives in Eden Mills. He has had solo and group exhibitions in many regional galleries in Ontario and has won several awards in the Wellington County Museum’s annual Insights exhibition.