JACQUES LOUIS VIDAL
I Make My Own Luck
on view: September 13th - October 14th, 2008
opening reception: September 13th, 6 - 8 pm
LaMontagne Gallery is pleased to open the fall season with a new exhibition of work by Jacques Louis Vidal.
Jacques Louis Vidal's current body of work deals with resiliency of an idea or object, as the most important part of its success. The artist mines the wells of superstition; pulling from a culture of gambling, romance, and entrepreneurship. Through the obsessive collecting and collaging, together of images, Vidal illustrates the humorous and heroic attempts to connect to the world around us through sturdy objects and works on paper. Vidal's work has many of the characteristics of folk art - a rejection of academic technique, a preference for centralized or all-over compositions, and a prioritization of the local rather than the general. Vidal's use of folk idioms has very little to do with the populist and wholesome values that underpin the majority of the work, which usually bears that name. Vidal's work is a complex intermingling of "wayward forms and subjects" treated with both reverence and skepticism.
Jacques Louis Vidal (b. 1982) received his BFA from the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston where he received numerous awards including the Museum School Student Annual Painting/Drawing Prize (2002), the Stephen D. Paine Scholarship (2000-2004), and the Katherine Lane Weems Merit Scholarship (2000-2004). Vidal is currently an MFA candidate at the Yale University School of Art.