Stanley Février - terre des fissures
2025 | STANLEY FÉVRIER
TERRE DES FISSURES
TORONTO
June 26 - Aug 16, 2025
Opening Reception : Thursday June 26, 2025, 6pm-8pm
Stanley Février, Terre des fissures, 2025, Digital print, variable dimensions.
Stanley Février is a visual artist who approaches art as a vehicle for social change. His practice explores the power dynamics in Western societies and examines the human and ethical costs of globalisation and its various attendant conflicts.
As part of this exhibition, Février brings together three projects produced over a two-year period, each one dealing with an event, either personal, professional, or political, that left him with a disorienting sense of powerlessness.
The first project began with a depiction in plaster of the artist’s body, slumped in a wheelbarrow. Recalling Jacques-Louis David’s The Death of Marat, the sculpture depicts the artist in defeat, but also in victory, having overcome hours of painful tearing away of the moulds involved in its making.
Initially, this commissioned artwork was rejected from the exhibition for which it was intended. Undeterred, Février elaborated on the sculpture with a series of accompanying paintings and drawings. By recontextualized the piece, he transformed the experience into an opportunity for rebirth and for a cathartic examination of why, and for whom, art is made.
The second project, entitled I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art, borrows its title from a seminal 1971 piece by John Baldessari. Unable to attend a residency at NSCAD, Baldessari requested that students write his titular phrase repeatedly on the school’s walls. The piece combines tedium and audacity in a deadpan call to arms. In the context of Février’s drawings on paper, canvas, and plaster-cast mirrors, Baldessari’s title serves as a motivating force and a therapeutic mantra as the artist dares himself to confront, as unsparingly as possible, the pain of his recent breakup.
The third project, Cocon: jarding des nuages et de Madone, reflects on a range of global conflicts and their resulting humanitarian crises. Février’s work acknowledges its own impotence in the face of unfathomable destruction, but the artist remains determined to counter such destruction, if only through an honest expression of sympathy and solidarity.
The three bodies of work prompt us to ask: How can pain be marshalled into a driving force for change? How can art be a catalyst for dialogue and healing? And how can we remain resilient in the face of loss and longing, corruption and conflict? Février doesn’t presume to provide solutions to such complex problems; rather, he invites us into his own intimate world, asking us to embrace vulnerability as a creative force.