Montrealer of Lebanese origin, Pia Metni explores subjects such as the search for identity, the meaning of human experience and the fullness of silence and solitude, delivering a complex rhetoric, full of meaning and exploration,  through a stimulating and simplistic tension of these linear minimalist works.

Mother of two, she lived her early childhood during Beirut's Civil War. Following the death of her father, her Quebec mother settled back in Canada with her younger sister and her. Before devoting herself entirely to her visual artistic practice, she excelled for more than 10 years in orthopedic medical sales, during which she took acting classes at the Lee Strasberg Institute in New York and Los Angeles.

Approach

An alternative and aesthetic response to our search for visual tranquillity and a sense of being, minimalism in art expresses the essence of a work. Her sleek monochrome paintings convey this through elegance and timelessness. In her works, she deploys an experimental freedom always characterized by the search for means of expression. She combines linearity, white spaces and materials with an almost mathematical concern by multiplying the application of materials in her creations, such as linen, canvas, leather, embossed paper or even graphite and steel.

“Certainly, the balance of minimalism is found in the balance of the medium and its composition, but this geometric vocabulary does not exist without addressing the facets of one's own existence.”

By limiting the visual palette and the absence of narrative elements, her works invite the viewer to meditative contemplation and a deeper understanding of their own experience and the world around them.

The artist explores temporality by the application of a gesture dictating its purpose by determining the abstraction of the line. This gesture of radical freedom testifies to the essence of an existence wishing to be honoured. Seizing the timelessness of a work by materializing the temporality of its subject.

The line, anchored in the durability of its authenticity, is the very identity of the artist. Her creations have become an act of rebellion fueled by the desire to validate her existence. "It's a dialogue through which honouring the line in my work represents the symbolic abstraction of materialized states of existence."