After she broke up with her partner of 12 years, Natalie Bruvels took a paintbrush to his paintings and covered his work with her own—without asking his permission.
“There was no agreement,” she said. “They were in my studio one day and . . . something just said ‘this is happening.’”
The vernissage for Bruvels’ show, Goodbye Lover at La Petit Mort Gallery Sept. 12 featured the results of this artistic vandalism.
“I guess I’m a graffiti artist now,” Bruvels laughed.
The paintings are engagingly bright and complex, abstract but with faces and parts of the human form still distinguishable.
She said having her paintings on top of his paintings turns the viewing experience into a sort of scavenger hunt.
Bruvels said painting over someone else’s work instead of on a blank canvas resulted in a type of interaction she’d never felt before.
“I would mix a colour on my pallet and then I’d bring my brush up to the canvas and I realized I had just mixed the colour that was under there previously,” Bruvels said.
The original work of her partner was integral in one painting in particular titled “In the Landury Room,” she said.
The painting depicts a man and a woman embracing. The red arm and leg or the woman, her breasts and the body of the man are all remnants of the painting underneath she said.
Bruvels said she recognizes painting over someone else’s work as “a truly vengeful thing to do.”
“There’s no way I could have done it to his painting had we not broken up. I really loved his paintings . . . Maybe it’s because I was used to them. I had seen them for so long it’s almost as if they were a part of me,” she explained.
“Painting over his painting doesn’t even feel vengeful,” she said.
“As I’m painting—because I know it’s such a vengeful act—I know somehow that I can’t make a vengeful painting, that the painting has to be filled with colour and life and intimacy and warmth and sometimes eroticism,” she added. “There has to be a tug in the opposite direction of the original act . . . I think it represents healing.”
She said her former partner is supportive of her work.
“He actually likes it believe it or not—or that’s what he tells me anyway,” she said. “He has the sensibility and the sensitivity of an artist. He thinks it’s a creative thing to do.”
His only request was she not paint over a few specific paintings, she said.
“But I did anyway,” she said with a slight smile.
Guy Berube, the curator of La Petit Mort said he thinks this show is a breakthrough for Bruvels as an artist.
“I’ve been watching what she’s been doing for three years and I’ve been waiting for her to shine through and she just happened to have done it on somebody else’s piece of canvas,” he said.
“Whether she painted on a rock, a corpse, or somebody else’s painting is fine with me as long as she found a substance to paint on to express what she has to say.”
