Poupart

In the words of John K Grande, “Better known for working in video and film in 1990s, Gisèle Poupart has also published her comics in fanzines and exhibited her paintings and drawing. An early interactive video collaboration involved storytelling sequences, the first interactive video ever produced in Québec where viewers played a situationist role. The viewer could modify the video sequencing and the test likewise changed. Each potential narrative, originating from one « story », altered by the audience, was then printed into a « book ». Other early 1990s videos by Gisèle Poupart with their minimalist performative aesthetict include one with a door that opened, with a mirror image from the “inside” where a scenario with faux décor- a real banquet – produced decades before trash culture built a double entendre worthy of Duchamp. Like novellas or mini-stories, Gisèle Poupart’s early videos expanded the definition of interactivity in what was not yet a new media.

“Le contrat”, Gisèle poupart ‘s debut comic book is very unusual, and closer to the raw language of punk or grunge but the scenic narratives capture atmosphere, and the characters have a colloquial feel to them. Poupart has a rare capacity to capture the faces and the human expressions of the characters in the story down to the detail.

While most manga and contemporary comic book artists seek perfection and a certain predictable repetitiveness with their comic book imagery, Poupart’s “Le contrat” (an English version will soon be available at www.lulu.com) glorifies the rough and raw. There is no pretense here. Poupart leaves the image open, at a point of tension, closer to art than the art of the comic book. If you were to remove the caption frames, these works would be paintings, with their relative nuances, jokey colloquialisms, gestural moments, quirky and resplendent scenes. Sometimes awkward, these images are forthright exposes of a story unfolding in time, with a string sense of a social, and it is the faces and expressions of the characters that have that ring of truth, found in the contexts and atmospheres Gisèle Poupart creates.”

An accomplished painter, Gisèle Poupart has studied visual arts and multimedia at the Université du Québec in Montréal. She has been exhibiting her work since 1984.