Well, longtime FOPs have come to appreciate--or at least accept--my obsession with unique contemporary art.
Well folks, contemporary art doesn't get much more unique than the work of sculptor Eric Lapointe. I happened upon his work at Espace B51 during a weekend jaunt in Old Montreal, and as a guy who has visited countless galleries and museums, I thought I had seen everything.
And then I saw Eric's stuff.
As first glance, he sculpts obtuse, wildly out-of-proportion, seemingly-abstract figures (like a golfer or computer user) and objects (like a F1 race car) in brass. Gorgeous yes, but seen it all before.
But within each of his sculptures is a glass lens, the wide-angle distorting type most familiarly-found in front door peepholes. Take a look through Lapointe's lenses, and suddenly, his brass explosions--stretched, elongated, bloated, almost unrecognizable in many cases--become photo-realistic, picture-perfect.
The effect is startling, and practically unbelievable. You find
yourself looking at the piece over and over, from all angles, and then
through the lens again, bewildered and impressed that someone can turn
such incredibly disproportionate abstracts into something so incredibly
lifelike.
For example, take a look at the piece called "Capsule" above. The picture here doesn't do it justice, but at least gives you an idea of the two very different perspectives of one piece. At first glance, a flight of wind-blown metal. But take a look at the lens in the figure's tweezer-like fingers and you get a portrait of a young woman.
Eric calls this "tri-dimensional anamorphosis."
I call it double-barreled Pow!
Right Between The Eyes. Twice.