New York City-based artist Daniel Bilodeau creates work that blends traditional still-life and figure studies with postmodern, existential displacement. These are works that feel as though once complete, were re-arranged by the hands of another creator. There are traces of traditional Dutch still-life in Bilodeau’s works, but there’s also a contemporary, graphical quality to the work, which in its dissonance, offers physical and psychological complexity.
In a statement for his summer 2016 show at Island Weiss Gallery in New York, titled “Consumed,” he offers insight into the inclusion of overgrown flora into his oil paintings: “Flowers in a vase are an ordinary sight to us today, and it is hard for us to imagine the luxury and exoticism they held for a Dutch person in the Golden Age. Flowers held many meanings. Sometimes they were reminders of our own death to come, sometimes they held specific religious messages, but there was always the fact of their recent introduction into society as something rare, opulent, status giving, even sinful.”
Bilodeau’s work is part of several public and private collections, include Citadel Museum in Texas, the New York Law School, the Ringling College of Art and Design, and others.
