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Artist Statement:
Coming Soon!
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Artist Exhibitions:
S O L O E X
2005 Luminous Memory,
Emmersive Gallery, Toronto,
Canada
2003 Brewsoul, Angell
Gallery, Toronto, Canada
2002 New Portraiture,
Angell Gallery, Toronto,
Canada.
2001 The GetWell, The
DeLeon White Gallery, Toronto,
Canada.
1999 The Fifinochio
Chronicles, Angell Gallery,
Toronto, Canada.
1995 Bivouac, Gallerie
Pallinure, Marseilles, France.
1991 ...
Further Information
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Artist Galleries:
Victoria Anstead Art Advisory,
New York, USA
DeLong Gallery, Toronto,
Canada
Seeking NEW INTERNATIONAL
Representation.
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Collections:
National Gallery of Canada,
Ottawa, , Canada
The Canada Council Art Bank
Vancouver Art Gallery,
Vancouver, British Columbia,
Canada / Winnipeg Art
Gallery, Winnipeg, Manitoba,
Canada
Art Gallery of Ontario,
Toronto, Ontario Canada
Atabasca University,
Sakatchewan, Canada
Robert McLaughlin Gallery,
Oshawa, , Canada ...
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Commissions:
Seventh Generation,
Burlington, Vermont, USA
First Financial Place,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Rogers Centre (Skydome),
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
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Reviews for Napoleon Brousseau:
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.... CAPSULATED EXHIBITON REVIEWS ....
" Media as mixed as they come "
The Toronto Star -- Art By Numbers. Saturday, June 21, 2003.
by Susan Walker.
Hell 'en High Heels Kabal, by Napoleon Brousseau
Napoleon Brousseau (formerly the Napo B of Fastwürms) could be known for his titles alone. In 1999 he had a show called "The Fifinochio Chronicles"; two years later he did "The Getwell Test." His current show, closing later today at the Angell Gallery, is "brewsoul." The title is a pun on his name, but it's not mere wordplay. "It's like a brew in the soul kitchen," says Brousseau. There are works in the show going back as far as 1995, but theyrelate to more current work.
Media don't get more mixed than this. There are paintings, pastels, drawings in marker ink, digitally composed pictures - sometimes several media appear to be employed in one picture.
Brousseau works on the evolutionary principle.A number of paintings in this show originated as digital images that the artist created on computer, working his wizardry with PhotoShop. "In a way my paintings are never finished. I keep taking photos of them and when they most closely represent the digital pictures then I consider them finished." After "New Portraiture," an uncommonly serious show he presented in 2002, Brousseau felt it was time to have some fun. The kind of fun he had in mind starts with a meditative practice that leads to his drawing hundreds of sketches, scarcely looking at the paper, and sometimes timing himself with an egg timer to make sure he doesn't spend too much time on each one. "I might do 200 or 300 of these sketches in a day," he says. It's a stream-of-consciousness tactic he employs to keep coming up with fresh images. "I've been painting since I was 14. I'm 53 now. I have to be careful that I don't just fall back on my skills. To do this I have to suppress my inner critic."
Hell 'en High Heels Kabal began with one of these sketches, seen on the wall beside it. It's called Shoo-Head, and it's a charcoal drawing from 1995 of a human skull sitting snugly in a high-heeled shoe. "I love drawing high heels. It either looks right or it doesn't. When it looks right it really jazzes up a painting. I've even put high heels on cars.""I did my first oil painting of the sketch a year later. Then I took that painting and digitally reworked it. I came up with a wire-frame version of the head. Then I did another painting, but without brushes. I used rollers to get a pixelated effect." Brousseau did a pair of skulls in a pair of high heels. Then he got the idea of using the Pinocchio nose (from his hermaphrodite Fifis) because a nose can exist in a wireframe skull, but not on a real skull. "I drew them together having a secret meeting. One (with the nose) is whispering lies into the other's ear. I did this painting during the Iraq war when a lot of things were being done in secret, but we only got the surface version."
Brousseau removed himself from the tradition of oil paintings, so the works in this show are not done on stretched canvas and they're not framed. They're painted on vinyl and float on the wall. "So it's oil on oil," he says.
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"Provocative brew thrills the soul"
The Globe and Mail. Saturday, May 31, 2003, Page R12
by Gary Michael Dault.
Brewsoul is both the name of this exhibition of new work by Napoleon Brousseau, the name of his Web site ( http://www.brewsoul.com ), and, as a derivative of his own name, a compressed way of describing his generative fervour as an artist.The Toronto-based, world-travelling Brousseau, whose Brewsoul opened on Thursday at the Angell Gallery in Toronto, is one of those electric/ eclectic artists who pours all of his experience and all of his multifaceted musings directly into his work. The result is a thrilling sort of imagistic and metaphysical chaos that throws you back on your own resources in a way that is both liberating and unnerving. Keeping himself "as loose as possible," as he puts it, in his relationship to mass-media images and the meanings he extracts from them, Brousseau wields both brush and computer in his restless pursuit of the sensuous and political truths of our howlingly misguided lives.
His approach is spontaneous, disconcertingly direct and, sometimes, intriguingly improper. In his Old Faithful Denial State, for example, two of the bizarre characters he calls his Fifis -- odd transsexual sprites that possess and are possessed by enormous phallic noses -- engage in a kind of short-circuited act of nose orality in a great translucent bubble which floats hugely in a sky near a lushly-painted crowd scrutinizing the eruption of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone Park. "Old Faithful has changed," Brousseau tells me. "It has to be made faithful now, has to be made to erupt on time, like a special effect. So even the geyser is now complicit with the ongoing mess of late capitalism." The geyser is eruptive and, more specifically, ejaculatory. Which is, presumably, no longer an entirely natural process. Even sex is thus subsumed by techno-political control. The two mutualizing Fifis, who might have been forces for sensuous good, sexual muses, seem oblivious to humanity's fallen condition, isolated, as they are, in their own self-absorption. All this gives Brousseau a sort of wistful Wilhelm Reich-like feel (Reich being the renegade defector from Freud's tribe who felt that we had all become too "armoured" to have orgasms and built us "orgone boxes" to help).
The rest of this riveting exhibition is just as dense and provocative, with its floating Eve-like woman weeping or drooling a new world (Landscape Bubble) and its wire-frame skulls nestled in high-heeled pumps (Helen Highheels Kabul). Everything is beautifully drawn, exquisitely painted, cunningly digitalized -- and passing strange.
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"MY INCOGNITO PORTRAIT"
The Globe and Mail. Saturday, March 2, 2002 - Print Edition, Page R11
by Gary Michael Dault.
This is me. Actually, it is and isn't me.
A few months ago, Napoleon Brousseau, whose exhibition, The New Portraiture, has just opened at Toronto's Angell Gallery, called to ask if he could come around and take my photograph. Although I've known Brousseau for 25 years (he was a student of mine when he and his then partner, artist Kim Kozzi, founded the soon-to-be legendary art duo Fast Wurms), I remember protesting that I was busy, unkempt and otherwise unqualified, just at the moment, for immortality.
"That doesn't matter," Brousseau explained happily, "I'll just be a few minutes. We'll take the photo in your dining room, in front of the books and, given the way I'm doing it, nobody will recognize you anyhow. It won't really be you -- it'll just be your outline."
The critic has become little more than a collection of books, barely distinguishable from his library.
In another portrait, artist and friend Italo Abate sits on a couch in his studio, a clutter of colour filling his outline and three pugs vying for space on his lap. Brousseau has cut and pasted elements from elsewhere in the studio to fill the background to overflowing.
The portraits of his own family are particularly engaging. Daughter Leah is pictured in an acid-washed version of a toy store, resting triumphantly on a bicycle. His wife, Tara, is posed in the meat aisle of a supermarket, gingerly holding a packaged slab of meat. Thanks to Brousseau's digital manipulation, she's been coloured in beef tones.
The delight and intimacy in these portraits signal Brousseau's mastery of whatever medium he decides to tackle.
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"NEW PORTRAITURE ALTERNATIVE VISION"
Baby Sitter, NOW Magazine, March 14, 2002.
by Thomas Hirshmann
If you dislike those stodgy old portraits whose stern eyes follow your every move, then Napoleon Brousseau's latest show is for you. The subjects have no eyes. In fact, the subjects are barely subjects.With this series of portraits, Brousseau departs from the very dark pieces of his previous show at Angell. The new images are a bombardment of colour digitally manipulated to make each sitter an afterthought within his or her surroundings.
Brousseau was right. The resulting portrait, which is included in the new exhibition, is of course not really me. In a certain way, though, it is me and more. The way Brousseau has deployed his digital camera, the background comes smiling through, bright and assertive: you can clearly see the papier-mâché Batman mask my children once made, for example, and my C-3PO cookie jar, whereas I have been digitally liquefied into a volume of translucent jelly that looks sort of humanoid, but which is clearly composed of the very books before which I sit. As with any good renaissance portrait, I am here accompanied by my own attributes. You are, presumably, what you read.
The other subjects of Brousseau's New Portraiture are similarly accompanied and contextualized. Painter Richard Gorman has been digitally inserted into one of his paintings and seems gradually to emerge from it. His own legs extend from the bottom of the painting in such a way that the painting is now free to perambulate -- painting and painter having magically become one. Ana Serrano, a friend of Brousseau's from the Canadian Film Institute -- where he has recently completed a residency -- stands out in the landscape. In contrast to the trees around her, she is made up entirely of text. Artist and designer Fiona Smyth is a crystallized riot of her own funky possessions, smiling gleefully through her own engulfment.
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>>>>>> Loaded With Love, Lust and Protruding Parts >>>>>>
At the Galleries, National Post, Saturday, June 10, 2000.
by Thomas Hirshmann
Aside from its reference to sexual potency, the title of this group exhibit readily applies to both the talent on display and the state of the fellow who stumbled past me when I was checking out the Vessna Perunovich work hanging in the gallery window. Hanging may not be the most appropriate description, seeing as the penis that protrudes through the zipper at the centre of the square red cloth is standing boldly at attention. The penis is constructed from a balloon - not unlike a balloon animal - so the zipper is a real threat.
Jill Ballard has photographed a model of an pickup with the door open to expose a Plasticine couple in action. Sue Lloyd's close-up of strands pubic hair spilling above a panty line is higly erotic. Johannes Zits's work plops smudgily painted naked couples - usually in some advanced round of sexual sparring - into digitally manipulated interior-design magazine pictures and ads. The Pair in Exploring Your Interior World are doing as the title suggests, and on a very nice couch at that.
A manipulated photograph by Napoleon Brousseau is sadder and subtler. A bride has been captures in a romantic pose with her
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