Jacques Philippe Hébert

Just as he subjects Venetian glass to the heat of a kiln and brings out the crystalline intricacies lying dormant in its structures, Canadian artist Jacques Philippe Hébert removes organic forms from their environment and redefines them through the fervor of his art. The familiar shapes of flora, the human body, minerals and deep-ocean life are transformed in a kiln at high temperatures and elevated to a level where they exist provocatively on the edge of abstraction. Colors in Hebert's works seethe as light itself is captured within the glass' magnifying qualities and primordial bubbles. Even his liquid-blue oceans burn with cherry-red veins.

Hebert's work is highly cross-referential, as it speaks of the universal structures and tensions which underlie all phenomenon in the natural world. Whether they suggest crystals, summer lightning, underground root systems or water ripples, the vortices emanating from Hebert's work graphically display a certain undeniable truth: There is a white-hot core from which all things emanate, and Jacques Philippe Hebert's artwork has captured it.