Chris Kline
La Manche

From July 13 to August 31st, 2024

Nearly ten years ago Chris Kline began a process of reconfiguring his paintings. By deposing finished canvases from their stretchers, interposing them between the walls and floor in his studio, interleaving them between sheets of glass, plywood, raw canvas, and layers of gesso, an image appeared in a matrix of indirect “brush-strokes”: traces of the geometries of the absented stretcher-frame; the factures of cut, stretched, primed, painted cloth; and the surfaces of concrete and gypsum-board. Reframed and repositioned inside the expanded perimeters of new supports, this image was submerged under applications of paint; the palimpsest of second-hand brush-work dissolved. Indications of margins, borders, or horizon which remained were overcast in an environment of transparent colour.

La Manche might evoke the shape of clothing or imply the presence or absence of the hand. Equally, it is one of the multitude of names that language gives to the ocean. The series is unnumbered.

Chris Kline lives and works in Montreal. His paintings have appeared in exhibitions at Oakville Galleries, The Southern Alberta Art Gallery, and The Agnes Etherington Art Centre. Group exhibitions include the 2011 Quebec Triennial Le Travail Qui Nous Attend, and Projet Peinture at Galerie L’UQAM. Longlisted for the Sobey Art Award and the RBC Painting Prize, the work has received support from the Canada Council and Le Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec. It may be found in private, corporate, and museum collections in Canada, the United States, and Europe.