Monique Mouton's softly iconic paintings on plywood ask for more than a moment's attention. A thin application of oil paint delivers you back to the gesso, the hand cut edges, the plywood. Her lucid execution stops short of delivering a fully resolved composition, confounding the viewer with such delicacy that an awareness of time, of the very moment when something begins, or suddenly changes, emanates from these modest ellipses. While certain formal elements of modernist painting may be recognized (the monochrome, the stripes, the drips), these paintings exist as something slower, much smaller, and poetic.

Mouton graduated from Emily Carr University of Art and Design, Vancouver, in 2006. Her work was most recently seen at the Vancouver Art Gallery's Enacting Abstraction (group), 2009; the OR Gallery (Vancouver) Making Real (group) curated by Eli Bornowsky, 2008; CSA Space (Vancouver), a two-person show with Michael Morris curated by Adam Harrison, 2008; and in Measure, a solo show curated by Colleen Brown at Bodger¹s and Kludgers Co-operative Art Parlour (Vancouver), 2007.