Meant as an homage to Paul Cézanne (2006 marked the hundredth anniversary of his death), Cézanne’s Eyes and Hands brings together works that examine modern art and the importance of landscape for human beings, while exploring the passage from reality to fiction.

The exhibition is composed of seven pieces (videos, installations and photographs) that explore with humour and insight the world of Cézanne, recycling and updating themes, motifs, stories and issues related to the painter’s approach and practice as well as his social and geographical environment. For example, a static video showing Glenn Lewis as he paints Mount Sainte-Victoire recalls not only Cézanne’s determination to capture the shapes of the landscape but also the fine workings of perception, whereas a series of photographs showing local residents sitting at a table in an Aix-en-Provence bar evokes Cézanne’s famous Card Players. Also part of the exhibition: an installation staging the painter’s cloak and hat with skull, a documentary work evocative of his joyful trips on the Arc River, an assemblage inspired by the investigations of Poe’s Auguste Dupin, and a multi-video installation with Aix’s fountains based on an trivial encounter between Cézanne and Manet.

Glenn Lewis graduated from the Vancouver School of Art in 1958, was an apprentice at the Leach Pottery in St. Ives, Cornwall (1961-63), a member of Vancouver’s art collective Intermedia (1966-73), and Director of the Western Front (1978-86). Lewis’s creative production over the past forty years is moved forward by way of continuing experiments in painting, ceramics, sculpture, performance, photography, video and installation. His practice during this time has dealt with: concepts, the commonplace, collaboration, nature mythology, texts (his own and literary), and appropriation. This was enacted in numerous exhibitions, performances, and research in Japan, India, Iran, Italy, Turkey; Stuttgart, Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Paris, Antwerp, Calgary, Los Angeles, Oakland, Berlin, Budapest, Amsterdam, New York, and other cities; and in commissions such as the Great Wall of 1984, National Science Library, Ottawa. In 1968 Lewis presented one of the first performance artworks in Canada (Flour Piece) and the early 1969 a video-performance piece (Japanese Pickled Cabbage).