Standing in front of one of Numa Amun’s paintings means contemplating the precision of the gesture, marvelling at the manic meticulousness of the work, and letting oneself be guided by the artist’s obsession with line and colour. It means admiring his infinite patience, so antithetical to our era, through which Amun develops a rigorous plan that leaves nothing to chance. It takes the artist more than one year to paint a single work. It is hard to believe that these paintings, mysteriously recessed into the walls, were created using entirely analogue methods, without resorting to any digital tools, by perfecting a squaring technique that could have existed two thousand years ago.
The exhibition Absoluité presents Amun’s most recent work. Three hyperrealist paintings attempt to represent something that is not usually visible: three characters caught in the middle of the mysterious, subjective experience of astral projection. Also referred to as an out-of-body experience, this state occurs when a person has the sensation that their consciousness separates from their physical body. Amun has chosen to represent this displacement of consciousness outside of the bodily shell by trying to represent the body in all its exactness. The colours and textures evoke muscles, unwittingly reminding us that the heart, lungs, intestines also exist under the skin.
In this exhibition, Numa Amun approaches the contemplative experience as a meditation on feeling, to the point of disconnecting body and mind. In so doing, he summons the invisible through a fragmentation of colour, like a fragmentation of reality.
Translated by Oana Avasilichioaei
1 Directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu, this 2003 film addresses existential questions about destiny, coincidence, life, and death.
The longer version of this text is available in the exhibition booklet.
Numa Amun
Numa Amun was born in Montreal 1974 and completed a master's degree in visual art at Concordia University. He exhibited in situ in the tower of Nativité de la Sainte-Vierge church in 2004 and at Très-Saint-Nom-de-Jésus church in 2018, both in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve. He has taken part in rare exhibitions both locally and outside the province, such as at Calgary's Illingworth Kerr Gallery in 2009. Having been part of the Biennale de Montréal in 2007 and the Triennale du Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal in 2011, he was most recently the subject of a solo exhibition at the MNBAQ in 2019, following the award of the Prix en art actuel du MNBAQ.