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is a Canadian painter whose work explores science, technology, memory and loss. Stephen was diagnosed with AIDS in 1984, when he was 28 years old. And while he survived the pandemic, his partner and countless friends did not. We sat down for an interview in his shaded, lush garden, facing tufts of sun-drenched grasses growing from the green roof of his studio, sprouting forth like the ideas tumbling from his head. Before I could even turn on the recorder, Stephen began, seeming to anticipate every question I had. Like his painting, he speaks languidly but with an insistence, making methodical marks that form into unexpected images.

As he launched into his thinking about placing his old work next to newer paintings in an upcoming exhibition that I am curating at the , our conversation became like one of his paintings where one just needs to step back to see the parts become a whole.

His exhibition opens at the Palais des Congress on October 16th, 2024.

Stephen Andrews (SA): I was thinking about abstraction and my fascination with the philosophical underpinnings of science, being a man of a certain age and thinking about mortality in very different ways than I did when I was a kid, like when I was diagnosed with AIDS at 28. At that time, I dealt with it as a kind of existential crisis, and my mortality was surrounded by uncertainty. Obviously, everybody knows everyone's going to die at a certain point in time, but you don't turn your mind to that, really, when you're in your 20s. When you get older, like in your 60s, you start to think about mortality. At this point, so many friends have died over the course of your life; you know you're in a kind of a second wave of deaths, and so you're thinking about your mortality again, but in very philosophical terms. It's gentler, it鈥檚 a not a resignation, but there's just, I guess, a realization that this is 鈥榠t鈥�. I was very lucky, I learned that 鈥榯his was it鈥� at a very early age, and have lived my life accordingly - fully, betting the farm, hoping to win big. In retrospect, having done so, that's where I'm at in this particular moment, just sort of reassessing what I've done in the past and thinking about this show that you want to curate.

With the show, it's interesting for me to look back and see the roots of what it is that I'm doing in this (new) work. You know, having produced work at a time when my life expectancy was one year, I thought about time in that moment, and now I think about time in this moment 鈥� but it's still brief 鈥� the briefness of life and the gift that is life is, is what my work has been about essentially. I think a while ago, you said, 鈥淥h, Stephen, your work's all about death.鈥� I answered that I didn't think so, I thought it was all about life. I still believe that.

Elle Flanders (EF): I was going to start with a question that I thought was provocative, but you got to everything before I did. My question was going to be: When reading an way back when, you said, in reference to your partner Alex dying, as well as many other friends: 鈥淎 person鈥檚 life doesn鈥檛 stop just because they鈥檙e dead.鈥� And having now spent more time with your work than previously, I realized that your work is really all about life. Quantum life. Can we talk about the life in your paintings?

SA: I want to talk about what I meant by that: I think there's something manifested when mail comes through the slot every day for the days following (a person鈥檚 death) and in a pre-digital time. So much of the work of putting someone's affairs in order was done through the mail, and so these reminders would come through every day 鈥� a reminder of the person's life. And it happens less frequently now, but at least once a year, when royalty checks from Alex's book come through the mail slot, it's like a gift from the ether. And so in fact, he is still alive and still providing for me and still there for me, emotionally, as this sort of touchstone. He's like a constant, like Planck's constant, or, any of those mathematical constants. It鈥檚 something against which you measure everything.

EF: Your work will be exhibited within a medical conference. What do you think about that?

SA: Reaching different audiences is always fascinating. This is a great opportunity to sort of get mom and dad back together again, because we're the orphans or the children of the divorce of art and science. So being in this kind of venue is putting these two things together because I think medicine and medical research and the way that the mind operates when problem solving is really no different than making a picture, deciding what picture to make, what to articulate, how to go about it. Methodologies, procedures, experiments - all of these things the artist is doing as well.

EF: What are you working on now and how does it relate to the work you will be showing?

SA: I just finished this big piece called The Artist鈥檚 Studio. It's my world and my people that entered (my studio) during the course of its manufacture. But the (other) paintings that I was painting at the time of making this two and a half year painting, (also) got painted into this painting. So all of those 鈥渟tar paintings鈥� that I was working on about the near death experience that I had (some of which will be on exhibition), that are about imagining the limitless and infinity, are all encapsulated in the microcosm that is my studio. So it sounds like I know what I'm doing when I'm doing it, when, in fact, I have no idea what it is that I'm doing. I'm looking for answers, and they only come through the play that happens in the studio and the accidents that happen in the laboratory.

Lead image: Stephen Andrews聽Auditorium聽(detail), 2009-2015 oil on canvas 72 x 95 3/4" Collection of The National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa