Catalogue Text

As the title of this exhibit indicates, Sylca: la route vers les sommets, Sylvie Carole Turcotte, alias Sylca, aspires to reach the heights of artistic expression. Indeed she spares nothing to pursue this lofty endeavour. Furthermore, she takes up the gauntlet with practically no training in art. Little wonder then that the pieces on display exude such verve.

In this vein, Rose Marine epitomizes what the present writer terms, superchromaticism, due to the cacophony of colours that loom larger than life on this canvas. Its visual impact comes from the predominance of red, blue, and yellow, i.e., the three primary colours. The artist employs them not merely to produce the secondary colours, green and orange, but rather to emulate a kaleidoscope. Like the latter, which reflect continually changing forms, the amorphousness of this painting evokes shape-shifting, an effect accentuated by its colours, which seem in a state of flux.

Bright colours cut a swath across the middle of Alégria #1, where they act as a horizontal axis that halves the picture plane. More to the point, they serve to simulate a vortex, that is to say, a mass of rotating or whirling fluid that tends to make everything spiral toward its centre. Not surprisingly therefore, this tableau gives viewers the impression of peering into the eye of the storm. By the same token, it vividly conveys a sense of beauty amidst turmoil.

Yet Alégria #1 clearly stands at some remove from figurative art, which portrays things perceived in the visible world. To what then do we attribute the vision articulated in this painting? The answer may lie in the theory of Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), founder of psychoanalysis, the study of unconscious mental processes, namely those which one has without realizing it. Freud’s seminal treatise, The Interpretation of Dreams (1899), argues that through dreams an idea or feeling can change into a picture, so that the dream picture represents an unconscious regression from words to images. Could Alégria #1 constitute a dream picture? Perhaps—to the extent that Sylca creates intuitively and spontaneously all her works. In fact, she neither sketches, draws nor executes preliminary studies, prior to painting. We can thus best view her artistic process as a, ‘stream of consciousness,’ the literary term for a technique that endeavours to reflect mental life at the borderline of conscious thought.

This accounts for the so-called ‘psychological’ perspective exemplified by Le magicien de l’avenir. Here the artist depicts flowers in keeping with their psychological interest, rather than according to their natural proportions. Further, Sylca pushes figuration to the verge of abstract art, which does not imitate or directly represent external reality. She does so by adopting in effect the perspectival approach known as anamorphosis, from the Greek word meaning ‘transform.’ It probes the experience of seeing an object from a radical point of view that utterly distorts its form. In this light we discern how Le magicien de l’avenir mirrors a manic episode with its characteristically elevated, expansive, or irritable moods, accompanied by the flight of ideas, as well as concomitant distractibility and agitation. This manic scenario goes hand in hand with the painting’s psychedelic colours. They signal a state of subjectively heightened perception and awareness.

In sum, the artwork of Sylvie Carole Turcotte involves more than meets the eye.

Norman F. Cornett, ph.d.

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À Professor Norman Cornett, an independent scholar and translator, Norman F.Cornett,ph.d, explores the relationship between culture, politics, and religion. He publishes in American and Canadian academic journals, and gives workshops on the arts in French and English.