The two photo-based easel paintings by Montreal artist Pierre Dorion depict architectural details of the exterior of the Blackwood’s e|gallery—a long, thin gallery located in the University of Toronto Mississauga’s award-winning Communication, Culture and Technology Building, designed in 2004 by Montreal architects Saucier + Perrotte. The intimately scaled Blackwood l (2014) depicts an inconspicuous ceiling corner as seen at eye level from an adjacent overlook. As much a homage to the intricacy and inventiveness of contemporary architecture as a playful recognition of a camera’s inability to accurately capture differing light sources, the painting posits soft mauve and drab green shadows that might fall on this minimalist juncture of a wall and a ceiling with an opening slot of indirect fluorescent lighting.

Dorion’s larger Blackwood ll (2014) is based on the artist’s photograph of a backlit frosted glass panel on the exterior wall of the e|gallery. The CCT Building’s novel wall treatment is cropped out of its architectural context and painted in careful gradations that emphasize the luminescence of the translucent wall while suggesting an ethereal rejigging of the vertical stripe paintings of the iconic Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman. In both Blackwood l and ll, Dorion has shifted the actual colour of the white ceiling corner or sharper acid green of the backlit wall panel in his choice of greyed pastels that suggest a mid-century domestic interior—as perhaps seen in the fading light of early evening.