I feel nervous. I would have liked to do this interview in person, but the distance forced us to adopt this format. I tried to create a Zoom meeting, without success. It was ultimately Cindy who sent me the link. Ever seen an interviewer ask the interviewee to hand him the microphone? Welcome to Jean-Christophe’s soap opera.
Cindy Phenix comes from Varennes. When she talks about it, I have the impression that it all starts there, in a basement that smells of wood, at the home of a lady met by a friend of a friend of her mother’s. She was 11 years old, perhaps a little younger, when she was enrolled in painting classes. Not DIY workshops with stickers or rainbow landscapes: no, the lady is severe, demanding, obsessed with proportions and negative spaces. She makes them redraw the void between two objects and copy American painters. Cindy says she has fond memories of it. When asked what events made her turn to art, she hesitates. Nothing spectacular. Rather a series of shifts, of confirmations. Her studies in visual arts at Concordia, then at Northwestern University in Chicago, galvanized her. She talks about it as a moment when she felt like she was in exactly the right place, even if she didn’t yet know where it would take her. In 2015, Cindy Phenix’s name appeared among the finalists in the RBC painting competition. The following year, we found her at the Saint-Lambert contemporary art fair, then at the Maison de la culture in Longueuil. Hugues Charbonneau decided to devote a first exhibition to him in a private gallery. His large-format paintings find buyers with collectors and companies even before the opening doors open. She has just returned from a solo exhibition in Finland, at the Makasiini Contemporary gallery. Finland marked it. She traveled to the Arctic too. She did a residency on a sailboat stuck in ice. She describes her experience to me as if she had walked on another planet. She had no cell signal and had to live in total silence. She says it made her feel zen. The light, above all, and the long shadows on the snow. The first thing she saw when she arrived was a bird flying over the water. He seemed motionless. You know, like those planes in the sky that you can see and they don’t move. We call it the parallax effect, it’s an optical illusion. This bird influenced its exhibition in Finland.
A few years ago, Cindy worked with lots of different materials in her first works. It allowed her to talk about the feminine world in her own way, recalling techniques often associated with women, such as sewing, ceramics or mosaic. She also does sculpture. She believes that this desire to touch everything comes from her father, who was a roofer. When she was little, she saw insulating foam, plywood, plaster and other construction materials lying around. Over time, she began to use them herself in her artistic work. Phenix’s colorful works speak to the relationships between humans, animals, strange creatures and even technology. It is inspired by the idea of the world as one big stage. Looking at one of his paintings is a bit like watching a room full of scenes all happening at the same time: there is drama, humor, chaos, and it very much resembles the tensions of our times. The monsters that she often paints allow her to criticize our world and show another way of resisting machines, which she sees as the sometimes worrying extension of our human gestures. Other supernatural presences revolve around these monsters: ghosts, witches, mermaids, aliens. Together, these creatures form a strange sort of family that gives a presence to forces we cannot see. They also allow him to show, in a more simple and sensitive way, what our very human way of looking at the world can be hard, limited or even destructive. I ask him to tell me a little more about these monsters and these ghosts. She tells me she got this idea from the book Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet, by Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing. A ghost is the past that comes back to haunt our mistakes, while the monster is the future and the hope that we still imagine is possible. In his work, the monsters are never scary: they are gentle, sometimes funny. She told me: “I try to paint empathy. » And that’s what I find wonderful in the work of this painter. It’s much easier to create work with the things that are wrong in the world. In one minute, you can easily find around fifteen problems. On the other hand, are we capable of doing the same with bright and hopeful things?
Today, she has lived in Los Angeles for four years. She loves California, despite the wildfires and earthquakes. She always keeps gallons of water and an emergency bag in her car: “You can’t do anything else. » And creation, in all this? Cindy tells me that she hasn’t had a major loss of inspiration yet. Her brain is in turmoil, she is inspired and inspiring. These days, she is interested in science: how trees communicate with each other, how we could write a possible world, real or surreal. Cindy tells me about Marguerite Humeau, who was interested in the funeral rituals of elephants and who consulted scientists to understand the gene linked to the appearance of language in humans. This mixture of science and imagination inspires him a lot. Humeau looks to the past to understand where we come from, while Phenix focuses mainly on what is happening now.
We reconnect a third time on Zoom. As usual, the app shuts down after an hour, so I ask her one last question before it closes: what’s bothering her the most these days? She tells me about her parents, who knew nothing about art before, but who now go to exhibitions. It does something to him. When I ask her if she misses Quebec, Cindy tells me that she plans to return to Montreal soon to see her grandmother. She smiled as she said it, as if everything came back to Varennes, to the basement of the madame who had forced her to look at the spaces between objects, where these tiny places are hidden that open onto something else.
