For her first solo exhibition at Galerie Antoine Ertaskiran entitled Rough Diamonds, Gold Dust, Jeanie Riddle presents a new series of paintings along with architectural and sculptural installations. Using different mediums, the artist builds a complex environment that refers to everyday feelings and to our own personal stories. Prefabricated materials, industrial paint, common objects and paint samples convey a pictorial, poetic and uncluttered language, thus creating a reminiscence of our inner space.

As she operates a thoughtful control of material, form and color, the artist describes her work in these words: “each color is poised, negotiated and positioned as a potential. I paint and repaint, to tell a different story. It is a narrative of chance, of pain, and romance. Nothing moves faster than being in color’’.

The frontal architecture, the one exposed in her paintings or the one implied in her in situ installations, sets up rules of engagement and reading guides for the viewer. Those rules create new connections between the exhibition’s space and the corpus of work, which is in turn highlighted or obscured.

Jeanie Riddle lives and works in Montreal where she completed a master degree in fine arts (painting) at Concordia University in 2005. In 2008, she was a finalist for the RBC Canadian Painting Competition and participated in an artist residency at the Triangle Arts in Brooklyn (2012). Her paintings and sculptures have been presented in many solo and group exhibitions in Canada, the United States and Germany: Tenor, McClure Gallery, Westmount QC, 1 Restoration, curator: Jake Moore, FOFA Gallery, Montreal, Deep, Plus A Direction (Bliss_CPD), Sur la Montagne, Berlin. Her work was reviewed by numerous specialized publications such as Frieze Magazine, Canadian Art, Rover Arts, Magenta Publishing and Vie des Arts. Her works are found in important collections such as the Banque de Montréal, RBC Investor Services (London (UK); Toronto, (Canada)), Giverny Capital, The Canadian Art Foundation, Collection de la Ville de Montréal and the Aldo Collection. Jeanie Riddle is also a curator and the director of Parisian Laundry (Canada).