Canadian artist Alex Garant produces an entire series of paintings dedicated to her experience with insomnia and the results are even more peculiar than her previous works.

The upcoming exhibit is entitled Voyage of The Insomniac, and it features new works by Toronto-based, Canadian, Québéquois artist Alex Garant. A painter known for her hyper-realistically rendered Op art portraits in which the faces and eyes of her subjects seem to skip their registers through image redoubling and superimposition, Garant is in search of the frenetic internal life of the sitter.

Garant clarifies: “For the past couple of years, I have been experiencing bouts of insomnia and I have been struggling with sleeping well. Unfortunately, I am the kind of individual who needs a lot of sleep. The lack of Z’s ended up putting me through quite a few days

of hazy wakefulness, in a sort of automated trance. This collection is inspired by those days, the awaken

hours passing by, lost between overstimulation and mental confusion. Trying to find beauty in

overthinking and attempting to embrace the haze.”

Not unlike the fugitive flicker of a screen or the spectral layering of multiple film exposures, her portraits reveal an unsettling multiplicity, shifting beneath the subject’s surface. Garant creates faces that challenge the optics of identity and the reductive way in which it is perceived, with a visual gimmick that quite literally dislodges and displaces its coherence to produce skittering psychological images of fracture and ricochet. The artist’s labor-intensive oil paintings are meticulously executed, often incorporating patterning or other graphic elements and motifs to produce reverberating visual effects.

“For me, the vibrancy is a visual representation of breathing, living, experiencing one’s self. Regarding

this specific collection, I would compare this to a mirror reflection experience. When you are so sleep

deprived and walk in front of a mirror, you look at yourself and wonder: Is this me? Is this what I look

like? Is this how people see me? Then you smile, thinking, I can look decent, and then you stare into your

own soul, witnessing your own struggles. That duality is what I am trying to represent in my imagery.” She explains.

Alex Garant’s paintings seem to erupt from within, testing the tensile seams of the skin, the body, as always, an insufficient vessel for the incongruous experience within.

The exhibit will be on view at Thinkspace Gallery, Los Angeles, August 4 to 15.

More info: alexgarant.com

REM, an Oil painting by Alex Garant

Counting On You, an Oil painting by Alex Garant

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