Rob Howse
Collector, Manhattan
“During the last painful decade of Soviet communism, Denyse Goulet, a young Canadian diplomat, lived and worked in Moscow. Her images capture the relationship between a ruthless, sinister power and its helpless victims. Her body of work is akin to that of painters such as Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans, who also captured this all-too-recent past through striking images emphasizing human brutality and alienation. Yet in Denyse Goulet’s work, an often exuberant palette is paired with a composition that could be described as expressionist. Her paintings sometimes hide an element of humour, some would even say satire. This is how her work transcends the gravity of its subject. It invites the imagination to rise above the greyness of oppression and adversity, as a Tiepolo sky does. It is a call to a liberation that, as we now know, is limited to the aesthetic, political reality not having really changed.”