Paul Bureau THRUST

 Bureau has fascination with intense color and a methodical layering of paint on surface developed over many years. His abstract paintings explore and incorporate these layers of paint: overlapping and forming patterns across different pictorial planes. There are no references to nature, the world or any other theme. He addresses the whole world of senses, drawing us to the materiality of paint and its expression across the rutted surface of the canvas. The works are thickly painted, almost over-painted, which gives a hint of something created by trial and error. It seems as though the layers of paint could be covering up something underneath the finished product.  Bureau approaches each canvas without any pre-established road map. His besmeared layers of impasto throb, spill over the edges. The paintings capture the medium of oil paint as both form and content as in the ʻplasticienʼ tradition of Quebec. It is a chromatic exploration of fractures or ruptures in color and pictorial planes built up layers of paint until a form crystallizes.