Marisa Portolese - Ciel variable Magazine

Marisa Portolese, Kinship as a Practice: In the Studio with Notman — Laurie Milner

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Essays
Authors: Laurie Milner | Artists: Marisa Portolese

[Winter 2019] By Laurie Milner [Excerpt] Kinship, broadly defined, is a core concept in Montreal artist Marisa Portolese’s photographic practice. We see kinship, in the context of family relations, enacted in Antonia’s Garden (2007–11), a series of portraits, still lifes, and landscapes that traces the psychic effects of trauma and the will to heal in […]

ARTGEIST II – FREE FIGURES

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Essays
Artists: Angela Grauerholz, Benoit Aquin, Éliane Excoffier, Marisa Portolese, Pascal Grandmaison

[Winter 2017] Artworks created as part of the find-raising campaign (2015-2016) Ciel variable presents the artworks created and acquired during its second fund-raising campaign, conducted in 2015–16. In the same spirit as Sitegeist, the 2012–13 campaign, Artgeist proposed that collectors support the magazine by acquiring an original work created specifically for them. This project also […]

Marisa Portolese, Belle de jour III: Dialogues with Notman’s Portraits of Women – James D. Campbell, More than Meets Her Eye: A Dimensional Portraiture

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

March 5, 2020 [originally published in CV104 in Fall 2016] — Montreal-based fine-art photographer Marisa Portolese has garnered well-deserved acclaim for the clarity and lush chromatic and emotional dimensionality of her images. The third instalment of her photographic series of portraits of women and girls titled Belle de jour marks something…

From Another Angle

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain […]

Another look at things

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] The works in this issue’s thematic section are anchored in realities diametrically opposed to each other – the seal hunt, social marginality, and representation of women – and are from different times. These works nevertheless come together in their challenging of prejudices and dominant thought systems. In fact, each proposes to portray people […]

Marisa Portolese, Antonia’s Garden – Isa Tousignant, Tending the Garden

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Authors: Isa Tousignant | Artists: Marisa Portolese

August 22, 2018 [originally published in CV96 in Winter 2014] — Walk around in early winter and you may just spot a dash of colour peeking through from under the first coats of snow that blanket the front gardens. That’s a carnation. Long after the peonies, lilies, and daffodils have gone, this sturdy flower still shines its bright hues, in defiance of the season of death…

Performing for the image

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Portfolios
Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese

These three montreal artists have in common the performative dimension of the images in their works. Bodies are staged in situations of intimacy, intrusion, or sacrifice to highlight how loved ones, strangers, and animals help to form our identity. JACYNTHE CARRIER Les Eux Here, we are as close as possible to bodies, in an interwoven […]

Making Image

Ciel variable 96 – PERFORMING FOR THE IMAGE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Jacynthe Carrier, Kim Waldron, Marisa Portolese

The thematic section of this issue presents recent works by three Montreal artists from the perspective of the performative dimension of their images. In these works, the artists stage bodies in situations of intimacy, intrusive proximity, or confrontation with their own fears, to bring to light how loved ones, strangers, and even animals help to […]

À louer / For Rent : UMA, various venues, Montreal – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 92 – TRUE NORTH | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

October 4, 2017 [originally published in CV92 in Fall 2012] — UMA, Montreal’s estimable Maison de l’image et de la photographie, has taken a valuable and highly laudatory initiative in seeking out vacant commercial spaces throughout Montreal and installing photographic works in their windows. What was once a forlorn blank slate of the inner city becomes a vibrant forum for the photographic image. The works remain on view until the spaces are rented or sold…

Marisa Portolese – James D. Campbell

Ciel variable 87 – SERIES | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: James D. Campbell | Artists: Marisa Portolese

September 13, 2016 [originally published in Winter 2011] — While acclaimed Montreal-based photographic artist Marisa Portolese has always used people she knows as subjects in her work, her new photographic series, Dream Weavers (of which this show, “Pietà,” is a stand-alone excerpt), marks something of a departure. Here, she turns inwards, essaying an up-close-and-personal narrative involving members of her own family while constructing a poetic meta-narrative that is rife with feelings, memories, and the numinous.

Alone, Curated by Penny Cousineau-Levine – Gary Michael Dault

Ciel variable 74 - LOGOS | Exhibition Reviews
Authors: Gary Michael Dault | Artists: Jennifer Campbell, Kate Greenslade, Lori Newdick, Mackenzie Stroh, Marisa Portolese

[Winter 2006-2007] Curated by Penny Cousineau-Levine Gallery 44 and Gallery TPW, Toronto September 14 – October 28, 2006 Loneliness, existential or otherwise, has been the informing condition of twentieth-century society, and it looks as if it will continue to be so in the twenty-first century. Penny Cousineau-Levine’s recent two-gallery exhibition, Alone, was a vivid, surprising, […]

Marisa Portolese, Belle de jour – Dayna McLeod, Tattooed innocence with post-punk appeal

Ciel variable 58 - NUDES AND PORTRAITS | Portfolios
Authors: Dayna McLeod | Artists: Marisa Portolese

[Summer 2002] Self-possessed women of all shapes, sizes, and ages, each fills the frame with intense looks, confidence, sex appeal, and power as she looks head-on into the camera’s lens and past, to the viewer. Compellingly seductive, these subjects pose for themselves and for the camera with a confronting gaze that is just as powerful. […]