Touching the Sun: “Let’s see what lies ahead” (Parker, 2017), 2018-2025, Oils on canvas, in the DataffectS exhibition @ Galerie de l’UQAM_Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay

Véronique Savard has been interested for several years in digital textualities (emails, spam, user policies, hyperlinks or clickable words, etc.), in what they reveal about the world, its perceptual, ideological and social structures. The artist examines more precisely the tension that certain digital solicitations can produce after they have been transcribed in the space of the painting. It is through painting and on large-format surfaces that Savard highlights and questions the various social, economic and political challenges associated with the paradigmatic structures that arise from digital language realities.

More recently, the artist has been dedicated to her project titled Touching the Sun: “Let’s see what lies ahead” (Parker, 2017), which is certainly one of the most exciting projects Savard has worked on to date. This pictorial undertaking began with her participation on March 23, 2018, in a public invitation by NASA to have her name added to a memory card onboard the Parker Solar Probe. As a result, her name, as a tangible digital trace, was launched into the cosmos, making this record the conceptual starting point of an intervention she claims as an artistic project and a true work of art.

Furthermore, this digital trace has become an extraordinary opportunity to create a pictorial and poetic connection with the spacecraft. This project leverages the probe’s geolocation data to create unique pictorial compositions. Using a visual language inspired by NASA’s graphics and aerial landscapes, these large-scale oil paintings explore the mysteries of space and light.

Each pictorial composition created for this project represents a fusion of abstraction and figuration, capturing the moments when the probe comes closest to the sun. As the probe’s mission nears its end with the final perihelion scheduled for June 19, 2025, this artistic project marks a convergence of space exploration and artistic expression, culminating in the symbolic, even allegorical fusion of the spacecraft, the memory card, and her name with our star.

Véronique Savard is a part-time teacher at the University of Quebec in Montreal. She holds a Ph.D. in arts studies and practices. Her research focuses on the intermedial dialogue between digital textuality and painting. Her work has been presented in many galleries in Quebec and Canada including Galerie de l’UQAM. She also has been awarded prestigious distinctions including the Claudine and Stephen Bronfman Fellowship in Contemporary Art and the Figura Ph.D. Scholarship (Figura: Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire). In addition to being part of the collection of the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, her work can be found in numerous corporate, enterprise and private collections. 

For more information, I invite you to read her doctoral thesis “Le tableau-écran : pour une perspective de recherche intermédiale entre textualités numériques et pratique picturale“ submitted to the Doctorate in studies and practices of the arts at the University of Quebec in Montreal

 or

The Remediation of Cyberspace in the Painting of Véronique Savard, by Teva Flaman Ph.D. and Pierre-Luc Verville M.A., published by Archée.