‍Robert Bernier, Parcours, Summer 2008

‍Painting is far from being a calm and steady river, even after centuries of global practice. Materials evolve, as do supports and tools, and above all, life changes and transforms, bringing with it new ways of feeling, seeing, and expressing it. Techniques evolve in the same direction, not to mention that they have constantly been questioned—not only in the twentieth century.

‍Despite everything, pictorial practice still requires a certain technical mastery of materials and tools, which are not necessarily the same across time and regions of the world. The most difficult aspect, because it is intangible, remains the artist’s ability to achieve distance: distance from technique, from the subject, and from painting itself. Distance… but what kind of distance? That of the artist.

‍Claude St-Jacques, whose work has been shown in galleries for over 25 years, like all artists, has gone through several periods since her beginnings. These periods in an artist’s life are in fact stages, points of transformation. The gaze changes, as do the approach and concerns. Yet rupture is rarely total; something most often remains.

‍Claude St-Jacques’s first period, which established itself in galleries, expressed an intimate and highly personal vision of her life as a miner’s daughter. Her questioning, her sorrows, her joys, her doubts were inscribed on the canvas with great sensitivity and dramatic tension—those elements that shape balance and bite into matter. Her dark palette, combined with a very sensual application, immersed her visual language in an introspective world not always easy for the artist to live in. Descending constantly into one’s emotions requires not only courage but also great inner strength and wisdom, for one must know how far to go into the depths of the soul, otherwise one risks what happens to the overly daring diver…

‍There are moments in life when one feels strong, almost invincible, and other moments when one is fragile. At one point, Claude wanted to resurface, to lighten her approach and emotional involvement—to shift the focus onto the motif rather than herself. “Get me out of myself!”

‍A more narrative painting then emerged, in which figures multiplied, while dramatic tension was now kept at a distance, touching only certain parts of the canvas and thus lightening both atmosphere and discourse. A body of work that expressed stories and temporal settings, often evocative of another era. Curiously, the figure that had once driven the painting into an introspective quest became the very element that relieved tension. It defused emotion.

‍Meanwhile, in the backgrounds of several works, a host of surprising motifs emerged—true small gems that nevertheless struggled to assert themselves within this context.

‍Continuing her pictorial journey, Claude St-Jacques recently brought it to a new stage. The figure that has inhabited her painting since the beginning now tends to disappear, or at least become more discreet. Her painting has regained density; emotion is no longer repressed. It is now better controlled, present, but it shares the space with a renewed formal dimension. Without being overtly decorative, it unfolds across the canvas with a richness of delicate motifs—gentle yet meaningful.

‍Without a doubt, Claude St-Jacques has made a full turn around herself. Her painting in this new period is serene while still conveying a more fully embraced dramatic tension. The artist now brings her subject forward with mastery. Claude St-Jacques has finally found her distance, and her pictorial practice is on an unprecedented path of fulfillment.