Highlands Exhibition, Martine Jardel

Oct 4-Nov 30, 2012, M-F, 10am-6pm, Oct 4 (Opening Reception) 5:30-7:30pm, Oct 13 (Champagne Reception) 3-4pm, Gallery open until 7 for YB Gallery Walk

Visual Aid Gallery presents "Highlands", a solo exhibition of paintings by French artist Martine Jardel. The public is invited to an opening reception and a champagne reception honoring the artist. Jardel has exhibited her work internationally, from the Bay Area to Paris, most recently at the Studio Shop in Burlingame, California. This summer Jardel and artist Thierry Rosset were featured in a show at Eglise Notre-Dame Portbail, a medieval church in Northwestern France.

In her "Highlands" series Jardel worked large to emphasize the gestural quality of the act of painting. In recent years, she has shifted from vertical canvases to painting horizontally. Inevitably, these new paintings suggest landscapes but the ground is as deceptive and unstable as the marshland and the horizon seems submerged in watery depths or fragmented and scattered over the canvas. Using the landscape as a space to explore ideas and images, Jardel visually evokes a collection of experiences, whose memories unspool and evolve at their own pace in her imagination.

Visual Aid Gallery stimulates dialogue around illness and art through exciting, diverse, at times controversial exhibitions that showcase work by Bay Area artists. The organization was founded to support artists with AIDS, during the height of the pandemic. Over time, Visual Aid expanded to encourage artists with life-threatening illnesses to continue their creative work.