COMBINE 2012: Annual Undergraduate Student Exhibition

Simon Larivière's Mythological Encounter presents the viewer with a deceptively simple hospital scene. The compositional space of the image is weighted towards figures surrounding a hospital bed in a semi-circle with the central focus on the bed itself. The viewer is located outside the hospital room, neither inside nor excluded from the scene. This viewpoint can also be directly related to the position of the artist himself, a distance between the event and the individuals therein. Looking closer, there is the tacit acknowledgement of an ability to access the pictorial space. An opening in the semi-circle leads the eye directly towards the focal point of the bed. However, one cannot actually enter this space: the viewer remains forever outside the hospital room, looking inwards.

When examining the figures themselves, this distance becomes more pronounced. Their bodies are relatively featureless, reduced to quick strokes of colour with minimal detail applied. The figures on the right-hand side form a continuous shape, melding together as one, save small slivers of colour that define their contours. One cannot readily identify these individuals; they could be anyone. We do not know these people, yet we sympathize with them and put ourselves in their place. However, with the knowledge that the painting was created in response to the death of the artist's grandmother, this division between subject and viewer is reinforced. The image implicates us in this communal event, yet refuses to reveal any intimate knowledge of the experience itself.

Larivière’s technique involves each stroke of the brush immediately reacting to the preceding one. This movement becomes automatic, closely tied to the idea of a flow of emotion directed from one's unconscious transmitted through continuous movement. The spontaneous nature of the painting points towards a larger concern for the artist, one in which a pure connection with emotion becomes the primary focus.

The canvas consists of an older painting that had been found in the garbage; the work was painted over it. This act of simultaneous creation and destruction mirrors the image of a person's final moments, their life being obscured by death's finality. However, if one looks close enough, small traces of the past still remain.

Larivière notes that the mythological encounter of the title suggests how links to the past were cut when his grandmother passed away. Real, historical links are erased, and only myths, imperfect memories are what remain. This notion of mythology also extends to the larger metaphor proffered by the work: death has become a mythological encounter, one in which familial history and shared experience intertwine with preconceptions of just what the final event should entail.