François Lacasse
March 14 - May 17, 2025
Arsenal Contemporary Art New York is pleased to present work by François Lacasse.
The practice of using abstract, reductive symbols is thousands of years old, but marks did not become detached from meaning until the early 20th century. That’s when the word ‘abstraction’ took on a second sense. Initially, it meant “drawn away, or separated from” a still discernible source—such as stick figures or Chinese pictograms. We have long talked of abstract reasoning in mathematics and philosophy. With the advent of abstract art in the 1910s, the word began to refer to an exploration of form for its own sake, independent of reference to the world of appearances.
Born into Québec’s rich and radical tradition of abstraction, Montreal painter François Lacasse practices a form of the idiom that exposes the inadequacy of the term. Focused exclusively on the magical properties of his materials, inks, oils and acrylic paints, inadvertent reference to recognizable subjects is scrupulously avoided. Both his medium and his subject is paint, its formal properties and its wonder.
Although Lacasse always pours his paint—as opposed to, say, brushing, smearing, spraying, or dripping, etc.—each new body of work is an exploration of a specific effect that he has learned to master and vary. This exhibition covers two recent and very different bodies of work that, surprisingly, were both achieved through pouring.
Born in 1958 in Rowdon, Québec François Lacasse holds an MFA from the Université du Québec at Montréal. His work is represented in numerous Canadian public collections, notably the National Gallery of Canada. This is his first solo exhibition in New York. Arsenal Contemporary is grateful to our colleagues at Blouin/Division Gallery in Toronto and Montreal for their generous collaboration on this beautiful exhibition.