DREAM STATE
Artist Irena Chrul illuminates the dark corners in our subconscious minds
BY STEPHANIE WHITTAKER
Fragments of dreams. Elusive memories of long-past events. A vaguely recalled face.
The work of Montreal painter Irena Chrul spies into the crevices in our subconscious minds, forcing us to look at what’s stored in there.
Chrul’s art is subversive, thought-provoking, sometimes disturbing and, for her, a catharsis. “People sometimes ask me about my paintings being a political statement. In fact, my whole life is a political statement,” says the artist as she stands in front of a triptych that elegantly depicts themes ranging from terrorism and war to women’s struggle for equality.
Chrul’s view of her own life as a political statement stems from her experience of growing up in Poland when it was part of the Eastern Bloc. While studying painting, poster design and sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Poznan, she worked in theatre, designing posters and costumes. “I met my husband there; he was a set designer,” she says.
The two fled Poland after martial law was declared in 1981. “We had to escape the country, and knew of many intellectuals who were escaping,” Chrul says. “An advertising agency had invited us to attend an exhibition in West Germany. We went to it and sought refugee status. Because we were refugees, we couldn’t work for that first year, so we took courses in computer-operated graphic design. Then we started our own company, specializing in graphic design, branding and packaging.” All the while, Chrul was painting.
She and her husband stayed in Germany for more than two decades, building a successful business that collaborated with large companies.
In 2003, she moved to New York, after splitting from her husband. “I love New York, with all its art and activity, but I couldn’t get a U.S. visa and I had to leave,” she says. “I came to Canada. My ex-husband had settled in London, Ont., where his sister lived, and he loved Canada. I came to Montreal and enrolled at McGill to learn French.”
But as time passed, Chrul became increasingly lonely in North America, yearning for friends and family abroad, so she bought an airline ticket to return to Germany. Shortly before her departure, she exhibited a few paintings in an atelier on St. Denis St. One of the people who wandered in to view them was Marc Hébert, a Quebec-born film director and photographer who had spent most of his adult life living in Europe. The two became a couple and Chrul cancelled her plans to leave Montreal.
Three years later, they moved to Italy, where they rented an apartment with a studio in a 12th-century Tuscan palace before returning to Montreal in 2013. Today, Chrul and Hébert live in a loft in St. Henri, where the artist devotes many hours to painting each day.
Her work is coveted by art collectors internationally. During an exhibition in Abu Dhabi, 12 paintings were sold in one day. A collector in San Francisco has bought several of her paintings. And a gallery in Washington D.C. has sold her work.
Recently, Chrul and Hébert opened Portfolio Arts Visuels, a small gallery where they display her work, in the Chateau St. Ambroise, a former 19th-century textile mill in St. Henri, converted to commercial lofts.
Despite the fact that her paintings look distinctly contemporary, Chrul says she uses techniques that date to the Renaissance. She sketches forms on canvas with charcoal and then repeatedly applies thin layers of paint – oil or watercolour – to give the images depth.
Her palette is subdued, devoid of vibrant colours. “I’m not a colourist,” she says. “I am very impressed with works such as those by David Hockney; his landscapes are full of colour. But I don’t have the courage to use bright colours.”
The subject matter, however, is startling, eclectic, and deliberately dissident. In one painting, the artist portrays the Habsburg empress Maria Theresa as ugly. The painting hangs beside one of Napoleon, who is portrayed with a small, pointed head and warped body. “These are my conversations with toxic personages,” Chrul says. “I make them look grotesque because we don’t need dictators or heroes.”
In some paintings, classical Greek and Roman sculptures are depicted through a gauzy film. One painting, for example, portrays ancient sculptures on pediments with disturbing, disoriented people in the foreground. “The background of this work is a museum,” she says. “The two women seated in front of the sculptures are victims of the terrorist bombing in Brussels. The little boy on the floor beside them is one of the survivors of the war in Syria.”
But not all of Chrul’s work is so politically freighted. One series of paintings depicts beautiful spherical objects that glow luminously. Are they eggs? “They’re actually grains of sand magnified under a microscope,” she says. “These paintings are about our place in the cosmos. We are tiny grains of sand in this vast universe.”
She and Hébert took the series to an exhibition in Abu Dhabi. “It’s a city created from sand,” says Hébert.
Despite Chrul’s focus on humanity’s dysfunctional nature, she also sees beauty everywhere. A series of portraits and figurative work reveals her fascination with faces and bodies, wrought in various guises. There are also impressionistic works that hint at ideas. A painting titled Venus at first glance resembles a wave on the surface of water. But look closer to decode the dreamlike body swimming under the wave and the chiffon of a bridal gown streaming from its surface.
Chrul recently began working on a series of large paintings of landscapes, which she says will define the next five years of her work. There is a sense of peace in them. “This is not a particular place. These landscapes are nowhere and nothing and nobody,” she says, gesturing to a vast unfinished tableau in her studio that conveys a hint of hills in the distance, a lake in the middle ground, and a patio umbrella in the foreground. But not quite. The images appear to be sheathed in gauze; they’re not fully fleshed out because they’re metaphors we see in dreams. They’re the visions we keep in the morass of our subconscious minds, awaiting an artist’s deft hand to pull them out and display them in the sharp light of day.
