As I now recall it, sunlight flooded my field of vision as I drew aside the bare canvas curtain that separated the two semi-private painting studios of Rowan Howe, a first-year graduate student at the University of Texas, and her colleague Alexandre Pépin.
When I visited him in May, Pépin was a (rare!) third-year MFA student. The north-facing wall of his studio was an expanse of tall, unobstructed windows on the top floor of UT’s Art Building.
“It’s a big studio for an emerging artist,” he acknowledged. “I’ve been lucky; you choose the best you can. When I leave, the studio is going to be up for grabs, and the second-years will have priority [in choosing their workspaces].” (Since my visit, he has graduated.)
Alexandre Pépin, “Fruits,” oil and distemper on canvas, 84 x 96″, 2022. Courtesy the artist.Pépin, 29, is French Canadian, from Montréal. He moved to Austin to attend UT in fall 2019, and by March 2020, COVID-19 had already disrupted his two-year degree plan. Following university-wide policy that halted students’ use of in-person laboratory and research spaces, the Department of Art and Art History were forced to deny studio art graduate students access to their own studios for a period of roughly four months in the spring and summer semesters of 2020.
Pépin took advantage of the opportunities offered by this unexpected derailment — a chance to stay for a third year in the program, and the chance to experiment with landscape painting out of the studio, en plein air.
Originally Pépin chose the program at UT, at least in part, to expose his artistic practice, his body, and his psyche to a climate and natural environment previously alien to him.
“I was thinking of the landscape,” he says. “I wanted to be in the heat, and in the dryness, in the scorching sun.”
Overall, his project here has been one of opening himself to new sensations, experiences, and influences. So, when campus closed, he gathered his paints and canvas and traveled to Pace Bend Park to paint his impression of the Texas Hill Country.
“I met the limit of the romantic vision of being a painter,” he recounts. “After half an hour [I was] so submerged in allergies that I couldn’t see. My whole body was secreting mucus. There’s mucus on the canvas. It’s disgusting, but [I had made] the commitment to go there, drive 45 minutes at least, carry [my] easel, and set up.”
Two of the three palettes in the artist’s studio. In his most recent paintings, Pépin has been using a combination of distemper — “pigment and glue” — and oil paint. Distemper can be absorbed into the surface of the canvas, rewetted, and sanded to achieve a variety of visual effects. Pépin relies on oil paint to add contrasting accents, textures, and dimension. Photo by Jeannie McKetta
Pépin shows a page in his sketchbook. At the bottom of the right page, there is sketched prototype for the central figure in “Fruits” (2022). “I used to reject the idea of figures,” he says. “And then they made their way into my work, really, really small ones. And then, I’m trying to move toward a figure that isn’t fully there, or a figure that also leaves room for absence, a figure that’s erased, sanded over, or is a pattern that is also the ground, or dissolves in space.” Photo by Jeannie McKetta
Left: “Wildflowers” (Pace Bend, TX) (2020), oil on wood panel, 18 x 24 in. Right: “Aftercare with Wildflowers” (2021), oil on canvas, 72 x 60 in. “Aftercare with Wildflowers” appeared in the exhibition “A Commitment to What is Before You,” at the Austin gallery Northern-Southern in February of this year. Images courtesy the artist.Under those punishing conditions, he nevertheless managed to complete “Wildflowers (Fleurs sauvages)” (2020). His staccato, almost pointillist, brushstrokes occur at a quick tempo, but their quantity and density attest to how long he must have withstood a searing and pollen-dense atmosphere.
“I kept going until I was totally blind. But this kind of experience of the landscape shapes you and the painting, and it is so different from the studio. It made me understand Impressionism through the lens of experience.”
And at that point it became essential to Pépin to recognize that the quickness of the Impressionists’ paintings, “also has to do with the body’s tolerance to being outside.”
Returning to the studio in Fall 2021, he used “Wildflowers” as a reference for determining the colors and textures that would appear in his larger five-by-six-foot, canvas titled “Aftercare with Wildflowers” (2021). The term “aftercare,” he explains, belongs to the lexicons of both medicine and BDSM. It refers to gestures of healing compassion extended to one who has undergone a physically or emotionally intense experience. “Tenderness,” and “tender” were words that recurred several times, like a mantra, throughout our conversation.
Left: “Bowl” (2022), distemper on burlap, 12 x 9 in. Right: “Bowl” (detail). Pépin primes the woven jute with clear, rather than the usual white, gesso. The brown of the fiber influences the color of the image. Images courtesy the artist.
Left: “Observing M57,” (2022) oil and distemper on linen, 36 x 24 in. Right: “Observing M57” (detail). At his Oxbow summer artist’s residency: “We did stargazing over a whole night,” Pépin recounts, “and at some point we saw Messier 57. It’s a nebula that, [the instructor] told me, is around 2500 light years away.” Images courtesy the artist
Air quite literally passes through the warp and weft of the stretched burlap fabric of his painting “Bowl” (2022). On this small, low-resolution surface, he has centered simple, universally recognizable, imagery — a cupped hand — in prudent earth tones.
Rust and shades of washy indigo establish the chromatic range for “Observing M57” (2022). The earthy pigments help establish a terrestrial setting for imagery that has metaphysical implications for Pépin. The inspiration for the piece came to him during a summer fellowship at the Ox-bow School of Art in Saugatuck, Michigan, when a guest instructor brought a telescope to share with the artists in residence.
He describes having the revelation that, as he bent to look into the telescope, millennia-old light was “hitting my retina.” It was a kind of visual time travel.
“There are relics of the world from that time, like paintings that are that old. It was so beautiful. It was a total aesthetic experience of beauty,” he marveled. “My priorities were totally up for grabs in this world. It felt humbling, and I wanted to make a painting about it.”
Perhaps Pépin’s account of plein-air painting had piqued my own histamine response, but I couldn’t help but see the nebulae depicted in “Observing M57” as clouds of pollen, fertile dust, spewing from the telescope’s lens. The figures resemble semi-melted sugar loaves.
Pépin’s figuration allows for this kind of associative departure.
“I want it to be in that space,” he says, “where it’s texture first, weird shapes, then possibly something else.”
Pépin will take part in the exhibition “Distant Sirens,” opening 6 to 9 p.m. July 22, at Shed Show, 100 E. 30th St.
