Montreal-based artist Luc Gauvin's paintings express dynamic and evocative bursts of nature. His art helps to transcending the dreariness of urban landscapes. Melding techniques such as pointillism, drip painting, and more representational nature painting, his canvases are saturated with the infinite tones and shades of lush vegetation. Gauvin alternates techniques to create different expressive qualities. In some works well-defined blades of grass are calming and still, while other pieces show an abstracted cornucopia of flowers blooming across the canvas with overwhelming energy.

Gauvin's work, however, goes beyond representing nature as simple escape. By rendering plant life in different ways depending on artistic inflection, he demonstrates nature's multiple thematic functions. In especially ebullient and colorful works, Gauvin's landscapes are revitalizing and hopeful. Painting well-defined and still blades of grass, meanwhile, the mood is quiet and restful, but also tense with the air of inevitable disruption. This multiplicity of nature in Gauvin's paintings transcends both urban blight and the conventions of nature painting itself.