Spring Thaw

48″ x 36″ x 1.5″
Mixed Media: acrylic paint on a birch panel with dimensional elements in wire.

“Spring Thaw” (2021) amplifies this principle into a more expansive field. The composition reads as a sweeping topography, but its articulation is resolutely graphic: broad areas of white suggest melting snow, while deep blues and greens stack into ridges and distant mountains. The pictorial space is simultaneously deep and flat, an oscillation that recalls modernism’s refusal of stable illusion. Yet Côté complicates the modernist flatness by introducing wire elements that hover at the surface and then step forward into real space. The wire cloud at the upper left, delicately looping, sits like a punctuation mark in the sky, but it also announces the painting’s refusal to be only an image. The thaw, then, is not only seasonal. It is conceptual. The work thaws the rigid separation between depiction and construction, between landscape as motif and painting as object.