Collections Detail – MAC Montréal

Artist: Cynthia Girard
Title: L’Échafaud
Dimensions and medium: Acrylic on canvas, 224.3 × 252 cm
Artwork description: Cynthia Girard’s L'Échafaud, from her series of paintings titled Fictions sylvestres, depicts a stylized crow perched on a branch, gazing at a log hung from a scaffold. The work’s implicit and morbid reference to execution echoes the artist’s critical view of Québec’s logging industry. Other works from this series carry many of the same aesthetic elements, including the monochromatic blue background—reminiscent of how the sky is depicted in popular representations of landscape—and the juxtaposition of a wide range of styles, such as the naturalism of the bird, the use of hard-edge and vibrant colours to produce optical effects, and finally, the simple, stylized techniques of naïve art.

Cynthia Girard