"Under-Texting"

Marcel Guldemond is a breath of fresh air; his use of traditional oil techniques combined with his illustration style makes his work a fun, unique, experience for all. His recent series is titled “Under-Texting” it depicts many storylines by contrasting brightly shaped comic book panels inside the golden glow of dusk, suggesting a larger narrative that the viewer can further explore.  

Marcel Guldemond lives in Ottawa, Ontario and is constantly inspired by the beautiful Canadian landscape. Marcel takes inspiration from Northern Ontario towns all the way to Parka Expeditions. His diverse work will be showcased in the month of February at the Elaine Fleck Gallery.  

Artist Statement 

Undertexting describes a new art making process I've developed, as well as the idea that we

as human beings use stories to understand everything in our lives; that the cultural context of

everything we've read and watched and listened to forms the underlying context of almost

every moment that we live.

One could also say that undertexting is about the relativity of meaning, that all meaning is only

ever understood within a cultural context, and how that cultural context is formed by the

stories we consume. [One could also say that it's about how the background context of how

we understand things is often a jumble, but that might just be a reflection of the disarray in my

own mind.]

As a art making process, Undertexting starts with a layer of torn photocopies of pages from

my favourite books, mostly novels, that I paste on to the panel over top of the original

drawings. I then paint on top of that with thin layers of paint (much thinner than I'd been using

in the past) allowing you to see some of the underlying text, making that cultural context more

explicit and part of the visual story.

Undertexting is a new art making process for me not only because of the underlying layers of

text, but also because I've completely changed how the paintings look: I've begun to explicitly

incorporate things from my background in comics. These include the use of inset panels,

which I'm using to show key scenes in the stories the paintings are describing, and the use of

more abstract line and flat colour based backgrounds, which set the emotional contexts and

the settings for the stories they tell.

When people would ask me what my paintings were about before Undertexting, I usually said

that they were scenes from imaginary novels, or what it felt and looked like to be in an

imaginary novel. These new paintings that make up Undertexting are, with their underlying

layers of text and their use of visual storytelling elements from the comics medium, even more

about scenes from, or being inside of, imaginary novels. I hope you enjoy them.

- Marcel Guldemond