KIPNZ is pleased to present “everything is never finished,” an exhibition of new oil paintings by Montreal-based artist Frédéric Tiffet.

Tiffet’s paintings suggest organic forms and topographies; at times in harmony and at times vibrating in discordance against one another. The eye moves over continents of color and edges that resemble torn paper, deep caverns, shadows and disturbances of light.  

Tiffet is a process painter. Over the course of several days he may build an entire system on the canvas, with deep structures and tones that advance and recede within the image. The next morning he will submerge everything in “ice”, but with a transparency that reveals what is underneath. He will repeat the process of laying on glazes, letting them dry, and painting again until he has found the proper “space” of the painting and it has taken on its own presence. 

While Tiffet’s work may suggest lineage with abstraction in painting, they are not truly “abstract”: each painting contains a world, a real space that goes deep into the surface. And between them, the paintings form a network of worlds that have mutually shaped each other in the studio. As Tiffet remarked, “If I look at other canvases that are near the one I am working on, they may end up demanding to be transformed all over again. And that is the danger for me: to lose a painting by another that overwhelms it more and more; this is why it is perhaps better to let more embryonic spaces go out into the world, and thus multiply the nuances, so that the apparitions circulate.”

Frédéric Tiffet (b. 1991) earned his Bachelor’s degree at Concordia University in Montréal, with a major in painting and drawing and a minor in philosophy. He lives in Montréal with his partner Stéphanie Séguin and their two young daughters.