The language  of abstraction in painting has been time and again rethought, reconstructed and revitalized,insofar, there remains little room for innovation in the vast field of nonrepresentation. The work of Gabriel Dubois however, mirrors certain contemporary phenomena with a intelligent sense of juxtaposition.

The visual world we experience today carries the weight of modern industrialization, along with it a whole new apparatus of the "networked society". Medial interference has become a common phenomena through digital and analog fragmentation: screens of animated information, virtual landscapes, composite photography and video, televised spectacle and age old print media. The disjointed amalgamation of signs and signifiers, in the form of still, moving and sometimes impossible imagery, has become commonplace in our understanding of contemporary visualization. For those living in urban centers there exists an exponential growth of such phenomena, all messages being compressed within the visual space which is available. Especially for those living within an urban culture where graffiti and street art is practised, there exists an even more fragmented space where those practising individuals proliferate their own visual codes i.e. extensions of their ego that embark a discourse with their surroundings. These fragments of human expression exist as a reaction against the commercial and bureaucratic landscape of signs therein competing for a moment of one's attention.

The fusion of these visual phenomena of both old and new, rural and urban can be seen in the work of Gabriel Dubois. Yet perhaps one should speak a little of his background in order to inform his work. Gabriel grew up in Van, Canada spending a lot of time in his father's painting studio, while also being fascinated in particular by his surrounding locality Chinatown. During his childhood and teenage years he was fascinated with hand painted signs and in general with what he calls "the leftovers of the East Side"; added to that his years of skateboarding, his involvement with graffiti and his summerly job as a house painter, Gabriel had an interesting mix of influences from early on. Once he moved on and started to travel the world in places like Sri Lanka, India and Japan he started to also become interested in the visual language of these environs, further informing his vast well of inspiration.

The works themselves somehow mirror these references, yet indirectly. The painted ground is layered with bursts of expression covered over with delicately articulated lines and a keen sense of color. At times there are clippings out of old magazines, applied directly onto the wooden panels and incorporated back into the ground of the painting, thereby juxtaposing photographic imagery within layers of organic expression. One reads the entirety of the composition differently in this sense. The use collage and paint application bring forth a certain form of disjunction; the images having been extracted out of their historical and contextual bindings of print thereby subtly referencing their own representation, the cultural moment they contain and the reproduction of it.