Horizons

January 23 to March 1, 2025

Mathieu Beauséjour
Jessica Eaton
Nicolas Grenier
Landon Mackenzie
Alexandre Pépin

Bradley Ertaskiran is pleased to present Horizons, showcasing the multidisciplinary work of Mathieu Beauséjour, Jessica Eaton, Nicolas Grenier, Landon Mackenzie, and Alexandre Pépin. Here, the horizon acts as both a tool and symbolic device, a means of playing with our visual and spatial limits to shape and interrogate the physical and metaphorical boundaries of our world. 

Montreal-based multidisciplinary artist Mathieu Beauséjour harnesses optical effects to create unnamed landscapes, which are alienating yet familiar. Thin graphite lines intersect and echo each other, which vibrate against the soft black backdrop, appearing hypnotically precise from close and nearly invisible from afar. The voids of negative space—the dark frame, an empty skyline, an ominous shadow, a hovering moon, perhaps—against charged contrasting marks give the impression of a deserted, infinite space, like a matrix underpinning our digital world. And yet despite the artist’s laborious method and the drawings’ austere clarity, these landscapes are unidentifiable; distance, time, and place are unclear, like a roadmap with no destination.

Across her practice, Toronto-based photographer Jessica Eaton has probed the perceived realities of her medium, exemplified in series like IOC. Aptly named after Josef Albers’ Interaction of Colour (1963), Eaton’s series comprises variations of brilliant cubes set within each other, only made perceptible to the human eye by a tedious analog process that transforms grey three-dimensional cubes into a vivid, flattened image. Eaton’s otherworldly hues combine the wonder of an abstract geometric painting with the precision and visual perplexity generated by a hyper-calculated process; the concentrated, symmetrical forms eschew definition, their object-ness revealed only by a slight shadow. Even so, it is unclear whether the forms are receding or drawing near, like a portal that beckons us into the unknown. Time, space, and depth collapse within a single image.

Montreal-based artist Nicolas Grenier creates painstaking paintings that veer on the metaphysical. Grenier’s artworks are meticulously informed by an ongoing interest in translating social and political dynamics into visual systems, namely as geometric abstractions interspersed with codes, design elements, symbols, and phrases. Calculated colour schemes converge in seamless gradations—soft blue to piercing yellow to deep orange—so harmonious and expert in their precision that they appear digitally produced. Grenier’s logical process yields affective results: a radiating light emits from the canvas, both calming and invigorating, whose force is stopped only by the limits of the frame.

Clarity meets obscurity in Alexandre Pépin’s textured paintings. The Austin-based artist often employs visual and narrative devices honed by Byzantine and Renaissance painters to evoke space and awe; flat, overlapping illustrations are broken up into panels or intimate scenes, like ancient tapestries or frescoes, and skewed as if meant to be experienced from different vantage points, both near and far. Each canvas hones distinct patterns and shapes accentuated by Pointalist-like blotches of paint or pastels, with hints of coarse canvas peaking through. This unique surface treatment conceals the figures, still lifes, and landscapes of Pépin’s world as much as it reveals them, as if we were gazing through a soft veil.

Canadian artist Landon Mackenzie also delves into textured, experimental painting, best shown in her Weather Pattern series (2021–), a durational experiment that submits her artworks’ weathered surfaces to transformative processes. Made outdoors, Mackenzie applies layers of paint and other materials to enormous swathes of canvas and exposes them to the elements, then drags them to another terrain, reapplies, exposes them anew, and so on. The process yields varied, magical results; the imbibed linen shrinks and crinkles from being moved coast to coast, dotted with deep hues, bleached sun patches, scuffs from rain and wind, and hardened bits of the land. The result is a constellation or map that carries the tangible memory of the places encountered, one that has tracked the earth’s changes as much as the artist’s. 

In Horizons, the exhibited artworks show sites of transition: from day to night, where earth meets sea, where the invisible is made visible.

^{The works by Landon Mackenzie are presented in collaboration with Nicholas Metivier Gallery, Toronto.}