Julie Trudel is a visual artist who subscribes to an extended definition of painting and whose practice is part of a reflexive and conceptual painting approach. She seeks to update traditional concerns of abstract painting through a renewal of its technical means—in terms of the medium, support and spatial layout. Her most recent plexiglas works are an exploration of the effects of ambient light on colour. Her works have been exhibited throughout Canada, in Europe and the United States, and have also been included in two major survey shows of contemporary Canadian painting. She is represented by Galerie Hugues Charbonneau (Montréal). As a painting professor at Université du Québec à Montréal, she co-founded a research group focusing on light, the Labo lumière [créations + recherches interdisciplinaires].

Research

In her doctoral research-creation project, she would like to formulate a new definition of painting to better understand the scope of a pictorial practice like hers, and other contemporary artists, where painting as a material is absent. One of the hypotheses she wishes to validate is that colour, historically a founding parameter in the disciplinary definition of painting, remains relevant to its understanding in the multidisciplinary context of contemporary art. In this way, she would like to enrich the definition of “painting in the expanded field” proposed by Fares in 2004. All of this will allow for a new definition of painting to emerge, based on the artists’ perspective and on their feelings, which would have the potential to open up painting as a multidisciplinary artistic approach.