NAPOLEON BROUSSEAU

Brief Press Clips

 

“Napoleon Brousseau has internalized the traveller’s fresh way of seeing and has produced urgent charcoal drawings of raw psychosexual power. Energized by the erotic sculpted reliefs at Indian temples, he has generated his own pantheon of hermaphrodites and cosmically united lovers-the leitmotif being the blurring of male/female/animal attributes.

Elsewhere the eroticism of self-pleasuring figures is short-circuited by their elongated Pinocchio noses. “It’s a formal device,” the artist explains. “It’s more about the humour that is inherent in every situation if you allow yourself to see it.”  Brousseau, for one, is not prepared to blink.
 -“Drawing the Line” By Betty Ann Jordan, Where Toronto- Jan.  2000

 

 

 

“Napoleon Brousseau’s works in charcoal are gestural and expressionistic. There is eroticism and a sense of grotesque and absurd play. Brousseau ’s lavish work also contains a strong statement on space and structure. The space, this time, describes one’s personal space and the manifestations possible for the creative and playful being. 

Brousseau builds cyborg figures not confined by sex or anatomy. They expand and grow across the page, weirdly entangled within their own limbs, undergoing metamorphosis, their gazes often searching and curious, their stances confident and exuberant. Dynamic, fantastic, and loud.”
-Genometry, by Corinna Ghaznavi, dart international, Fall 2000

 

 

 

“Napoleon’s Fifis, gigantic, sexually self-referential figures, was born deep in the fleshpots of Adobe Photoshop. Big, blowsy and raw, the Fifi oil paintings were crudely magnificent.I found these endearingly indecent Rabelaisian figures, with the “porn- utopian exaggerations of their Pinocchio/phallic noses to be “archetypal presences of some hitherto unknown primal play,” 

 

“Keeping up with Napoleon Brousseau” by Gary Michael Dault, Canadian Art Magazine, winter 1999

“Brousseau {who sleeps under a steel pyramid} dreams the recurring flight patterns of a sphere housed inside a cube, both floating through space. These clean traceries of his unconscious mind make up the content of his drawings. The drawings are exceedingly handsome.”
“Artist spurns the gallery scene and sets up show in the restaurant” 
by Gary Michael Dault,
The Toronto Star, March 1975.

 

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“If you stumble upon huge glowing white army ants swarming over the Cameron’s grungy façade, fear not. It’s a new installation by the exuberantly versatile Toronto filmmaker, performance artist and sculptor Napoleon Brousseau.”
John Bentley Mays,  1988

 

 

“Toronto based, but impressively peripatetic. Hearth Mandala Renewal, is a spring-solstice installation, a temple of consciousness involving four large hanging constructions.  Both directional and elemental the fireplaces are riotous concentrations of imagery painted, collected and collaged. They circle a large charcoal mandala that becomes the focal point of each viewer’s experience of these mystical hearths.”
Gallery Going by Gary Michael Dault, The Globe & Mail, Toronto 1999

 

 

 

“I would sincerely recommend you consider giving a few minutes of your time to this remarkable artist, Napoleon Brousseau. He is not only a gifted painter, he has some great ideas. The type of work he’s doing would not fit nearly so well on Madison Ave. as in the East Village, or I would seriously consider taking him on myself.”
-Bill Maynes, Director, Gimpel & Weitzenhoffer Ltd. NewYork. June 25, 1984

 

 

“Fastwurms creates overwhelming, anarchistic spaces. At its best, Fastwurms’ work displays a clarity of vision which approaches brilliance.”
Deidre Hanna, Now Magazine, Toronto, for Tombpossum, Wombblossom

 

 

The 242 Drawings at the Lake Galleries is filled with a multitude of hints and promises. The artist’s wild, wide-reaching creativity is appealing and leaves one wanting to see where he will go.”
“Drawing on the gaudy exterior of Indian mysticism” Art About, by Kate Taylor, The Globe and Mail, Sept. 6, 1991

 

“Napoleon’s hyper-Renaissance-like creativity shines through all of his works that are at once intriguing, thought-provoking, fresh, humorously charming, often shocking and hard to forget.”
Canadian Art Series: The Mantle Project at Chapters Bookstores, Toronto. Oct 1999

 

 

“Brousseau’s images are influenced by his dreams and communion with nature. Images found in Brousseau’s artwork include foxes, turtles, rabbits and skunks. The inclusion of these animals refers to the animal magnetism inherent in human nature, as do the hermaphroditic human/animal forms that characterize his more recent work.”
Napoleon Brousseau: suspending the inner critic in The Medium, 
Arts & Entertainment By Italo Abate, Nov.1997

 

 

“Loaded with love, lust and protruding parts. In a  manipulated photograph by Napoleon Brousseau, the sadness is human and real, as the bride’s beautiful white dress is stained bright red by the blood from the groom’s neck.”
At the Galleries: The National Post Newspaper, June 10, 2000

1 Motion Blur is an exuberant explosion of sky blues, green leaves, and yellow dapples of sunlight, all held together by white horizontal bands of paint-like Venetian blinds or like a staff of music on which Brousseau’s pastoral score is played out in one gigantic mural-sized print, which accumulated into its present form in about eight hours of paint application.”

“Making a good impression with prints” Visual Arts  by Gary Michael Dault, The Globe and Mail, Toronto July 24, 1999

 

“Say what you have to say and say, admonished D.H. Lawrence, and say it hot. That’s what Napoleon Brousseau has done in his raucous, belligerent, positively Rabelaisian exhibition of giclee prints on watercolour paper and large oils on canvas. Wild, woolly and alarmingly improper, Brousseau’s larger-than-life she-male rocks. In oils, Fifi can scarcely be contained, so fiercely do the flames of her passion burn. Cousin Fifi Inferno is hot painting in every sense of the word, and the great white Uncle Shim is one of the best paintings in town. 

-Gallery Going by Gary Michael Dault, The Fifinochio Chronicles at the Angell Gallery, The Globe and Mail, Toronto Jan. 30, 1999

 

 

 

“Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky have been spotted at 890 Queen Street West, or at least their images are there.  Two painted faces with long Pinocchio-like noses in a compromising sexual position dangle in the front window of the Angell Gallery. “…this is the boldest thing that’s hung in the window for a long time.” The piece is called Denial State, part of the Fifinochio Chronicles. Mr. Brousseau’s creations sprung out of his imagination and were done first, pixel-by-pixel, on a computer screen.The artist turned several of his cyber works into two-by-three metre oil paintings. He painted them while wearing 3-D glasses so that the images literally point right out at the viewer. Angell Gallery provides 3-D eyewear for visitors.”
These noses know tales of delight and deceit, by Mitchel Raphael, The National Post, Jan. 26, 1999

In 1985 Napoleon was one of the art directors at Area in Tribeca. 
Area, the club that Andy Warhol calls “the best designed” in Manhattan adopts a new “theme” every five weeks. “The medium that we’ve all come from is environmental,” says Eric Goode, {one of the club’s owners} film or photographic-visual. “We try to give people a chance to see a lot of little things-ideas that will stimulate interest in those kinds of people that we want and create an atmosphere and an environment that will set them off.” 
NY Dives, by Tom Dewe Mathews in Harpers & Queen Magazine, May 1985