Visitors to a Robert Therrien exhibition are immediately aware of entering a personal world, and above all a world of the unexpected. They are confronted by shapes and objects both familiar and strange. It is a world of deceptively childish charm and logic, where ideas can be literally translated into reality. Outward calm hints at dramatic possibilities. Sometimes inanimate things can become strikingly animated. Familiar shapes and substances change. Soft and light become hard and heavy and size seems out of control.

Some objects are found, some are made by and some for the artist. All are imbued with a warmth and tactile quality which is particularly his own. Therrien’s use of domestic images, piles of plate, brushes, furniture might suggest an interest in the spatial world of still-life, but his interest in the human body’s interaction with space seems more connected to architecture. The bird in flight that cuts a relief in a window-shaped piece of sky, the dutch doors that cut into the space of a room, the gothic window that could also be a boat, the thunderous keystone, the giant furniture – all are long-time preoccupations. The escape hatch and the floor on the wall carry on the theme.

For Therrien painting, sculpture and drawing are inextricably mixed. Ideally he likes to find a shape or image which will operate simultaneously in three dimensions, two dimensions and in relief. Over the years he has built up a group of images to return to again and again, which can allow for a virtually infinite number of interpretations. This suggestion of unending possibility gives these images the appearance of existing in a kind of state of continuous becoming, while at the same time being under the artist’s strict control. The images expose the drama of the unnoticed and invisible physical and mental relationships which exist in the world of human beings, between human beings themselves, and between the objects they create to help them live their lives.