Corkin Gallery is pleased to present What does the song hope for?, an exhibition of work by Québec painter Leopold Plotek. Anchored by large-scale works produced over the last decade, the exhibition surveys the evolution of the artist’s distinct approach to painting, which mobilizes reflection, improvisation, and, above all, hope.

The show takes its title from the first line of the W.H. Auden poem Orpheus. The question — “What does the song hope for?” — prompts viewers to meditate on the trajectory of artistic creation and the possibility for art to forge optimism and affirmation, especially during challenging times. Within his own practice, Plotek often finds solace in revisiting artists, poets, and philosophers of the past as he projects a new path forward with each painting.

The works in this exhibition reframe the Western canon as an object of personal experience and reflect the artist’s own engagement with architecture, artifacts, and art historical precedents. His interest in these particular subjects and sources, which range from Romanesque monuments and motifs to works by Modernist masters like Beckmann, Picabia, and Mondrian, extends beyond narrative and formal properties to encompass the conditions and spirit in which they were produced. Plotek relies on intuition and imagination to continually rework his paintings; he repeatedly scrapes the canvas to adjust colour, light, and line, all in pursuit of salvaging an irretrievable memory. By giving way to the desire to connect with an irreconcilable past and the impossibility of truly aligning experience with memory, Plotek is in fact immersing himself in the never-ending yet ever-hopeful process of translating feeling into form.