“Concupiscence” by Claude Couillard
Vie des arts (Montreal), Winter 1995, no. 161, p. 67
(Transl. Robert Howse)
“Male and female He created them”
Denyse GOULET
July 19 to August 18, 1995
Lake Galleries
624 Richmond Street West
Toronto M5V 1Y9
(416) 504-5234
Before throwing herself headlong into painting, Denyse Goulet followed a winding, motley path, steeped more in intellect than in colour. Curiously, that same path would become the soil of what she now calls her “fourth career”. Late in life, Denyse Goulet thus rediscovered the long-disowned vocation that had served as her escape, as a young girl, in the classroom. She now forges a pictorial universe that is at once fascinating and disconcerting, highly communicative, which scrutinizes with subtlety the relationships between men and women in the workplace. She paints to do herself justice. She has chosen the brush as her weapon.
A native of Quebec City, Denyse Goulet completed law studies — the legal profession would richly feed her imagination — followed by German studies in Berlin. In the mid-eighties, she worked at the Canadian Embassy in Moscow, in the middle of the Cold War. Those years, which she describes as “difficult”, led her to enrol in painting workshops there. Indeed, some of her paintings bear traces of her stay in a totalitarian environment. Thus the cloud of women walking confidently through her canvas entitled Equal Opportunity, a sort of anonymous Bécassines, seem at first glance to breathe lightness.
Yet at the same time, this bluish scene recalls the very Orwellian world of The Handmaid’s Tale by the Toronto novelist Margaret Atwood. That is what makes Denyse Goulet’s work so disturbing and effective: a social critique draped in a visually beautiful and colourful universe. In Law and Business, two women lawyers sitting side by side, naked, rub shoulders, in a stylish room bathed in light, with a crowd of impeccably dressed colleagues. It is hard to pin down the real focus of the meeting …
Denyse Goulet’s canvases bear curious names such as Bright Future, Career Morning, Travel Expenses,… Evocative and mocking titles that avoid the trap of crude prosaism, of combat, of the “political” art often practised in the Anglo-Saxon cultural milieu. Many women of the post-war generation, that of feminist progress and “taking personal charge”, will feel particularly addressed by this curious world where female colleagues are often victims, but where they also choose, on occasion, it must be said, to melt into masculine colours… Her paintings teem with figures whose features are suggested just enough to make out, especially in the men, poorly contained expressions of satisfaction and desire … Stigmata of expressionism. In Why Jones?, the men — executives dressed sometimes in brown, sometimes in blue — clink glasses in a boardroom turned drinking den, awkwardly displaying vicious smiles. Figures mostly seen from above, bending their backs. “Body language says much more than the language of the face,” she believes, “and the face loses its importance, especially in very complex compositions with 40 or 50 figures.”
Denyse Goulet sets her moods in earth tones and gradations of blue, often punctuated, particularly in her more “feminine” universes (Sassoon, The Joys of Bridge,…), with very bright, childlike colours.
Asked about the personal meaning of this emotionally charged palette, the painter favours rather theoretical and technical explanations, about the importance of colour harmony, of the proportionality of the work, … Once again one finds the dichotomy felt in Denyse Goulet, this time between the pictorial message and the discourse. Everything seems so spontaneous, yet so urgent in her brushstroke, so little concerned with aesthetic imperatives.
The freshness, the high quality of Denyse Goulet’s large varnished canvases, the finesse of her artistic purpose, the unifying irreverence of her inner world all signal the blossoming of an undeniable talent.
Claude COUILLARD
Why Jones?
Oil on canvas, 1993
135 x 120 cm
Courtesy of John Christman
Photo: Thomas Moore