Producing an extensive body of work, Carla de Livry is an artist with an inherent depth and intellectual ingenuity. Alongside a quick imagination and an almost inexhaustible creative energy, she has an acute ability to realize new perspectives with keen sensitivity.
Visceral and intuitive, she refuses to be bracketed, considering herself a classicist in a coat of modernity. Dividing her time between France and Canada, her captivating and at times audacious ideas, imaginatively translate the sometimes unexpected, into exuberantly rich and visually dynamic and repertoires, resulting in collections of diverse mediums that are distinctive and wholly contemporary.
Excerpt Interview with Catherine Guex MONTREAL MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS
Translated from the French
“My work is a narration of eager curiosity
and it is a process that is in constant evolution.”
Navigating between figurative and abstraction, I want my work to be powerful and yet beautiful, compelling and sublime. At times, my work may be precisely conceived and constructed, but it is important that it expresses qualities of lyricism and beauty, not for beauty itself, but as a whole and in the end as an instrument that gives the work its energy and its strength.
I am an artist classically trained and grateful for it. It has instilled in me discipline and drive. I love the principle, but I will not be categorized. I will say that this classical underpinning allows me to continually reinterpret my regard, to experiment and to take risks, in order to transform a concept into a work that is my own.
“A visual innovator of intense originality...
that cannot be exhausted by a single style or medium.”
... Carla de Livry is an artist who defies classification. Whether working in the figurative or non-figurative, she is and has always been a lyrical expressionist, perceptive and intuitive. A gestural and physical painter, she never really moves away from the figurative, which often gains her non-figurative if we look closely enough. With capricious autonomy, yet rooted in tradition, she is just as at ease with impasto painting as with inks, pastels, printing, collage, metal or clay. Her diversity and creative curiosity are prolific and her formidable stock of power and originality cannot be exhausted by a single style or medium. It is also this versatility that gives her the intense fertile freedom of innovation and originality.