Exposition individuelle à / Solo exhibition at Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain, Montréal
16 novembre 2024-11 janvier 2025 / November 16, 2024- January 11, 2025
Finissage : 11 janvier, 14h-17h / January 11, 2-5 pm

Bodies in space. From me to you something indeterminate blurs our edges. Is not empty.

This space. Intimate but public. This gallery, a space for contemplation. For reflection.

We reflect. From every surface.

You draw a breath and return it as light.

I offer it back to you as resistant architecture. Expansive, tender.

I offer it back in maps of circles, little “o”s, puffs of air, circular spaces, rhythmic systems. Streams.

Circulatory.

Back to where we drift into each other, part of everything.

…

This exhibition gathers together works from 27 and 22 years ago, and last year, surface evidence of a way of looking and making, art that comes through me like it wants to show me something. They are best experienced in person, but in case you missed it, here’s a recap…

Everything here centres around an untitled artwork I made in 1997 — a membrane of latex stretched over a room-scale frame and fitted with fans and timer to inflate and deflate at breathing pace. The Breathing Wall (Le mur qui respire), as it’s come to be known, is an expanse of fleshy stretchiness expanding and contracting bodily, but at the scale of a white gallery wall. It exists somewhere between the two, perhaps more so since I replaced the aging latex with silicone cast from my studio wall. When an architectural structure takes on the rhythm of exhalation and inhalation, even though the simplicity of its mechanism is visible and audible, that rhythm and movement inspires a feeling of commonality between it and the viewer. Seeing it again here has been like greeting an old friend. I can still be transfixed by its surface and confounded by its subtle, regular motion, but now I see there is a softness to it, gentle and encompassing. It’s a painting, a place, an experience.

Around the gallery new drawings made with acrylic medium are suspended, offset from the walls, responding to air currents, the breath of these rooms. They are delicate membranes, formed with loops and swirling lines, then peeled from their working surfaces. They are subject to gravity, hanging by a thread as they are, obeying that one law. They’re stream drawings, fine threads of liquid medium, medium being material or practice, something between states, between presence and absence, visually. Liquid and solid, intention and aftermath. Between-ness, where meaning slips. They are like wings, necklaces, breasts, clothing, bellies, but are also not. Not anything. Drawings of the space they are suspended within, revealing the light always there with its shadowy counterpart.

In the gallery vitrine, visible from the street, luminous strokes are sketched out across two walls (You draw a breath and return it as light /Vous prenez un souffle et rendez de la lumière, 2024). Cutout shapes of steel are secured to stand off the wall, perpendicular to it. With their thin edges barely visible we only see bands of light and shadow formed between their mirrored upper surfaces and the overhead LEDs. The lines follow a path of imaginary breath from passersby, shifting over the course of the day, almost imperceptible in low wintry daylight; sharply boisterous in the evening when only the window is illuminated. In the video room there’s a time lapse recording of this drawing in my studio, tracing the movement of sometimes subtle, sometimes startlingly brilliant reflections and improbable shapes of shadow as daylight angled in through a south-facing window over three days.

There are some water drawings too, attached minimally to the wall so they waft a little when you walk past. I’ve been making these occasionally since 2002, drawing circles of water on vellum paper, getting lost in the process of a nearly invisible medium that gives back swaths of cellular patterns. They return me to a practice of drawing rhythmically, and helped ground me when working through the technical challenges of the stream drawings. Here they provide a subtle line of connection between the breathing wall and the new drawings, ongoingness, patterns like breathing. The circularity of their marks, here and in the stream drawings are like writing, “o,” “o,” “o,” over and over. Continually, quietly awestruck.

With many thanks to Pierre-François Ouellette, Sophie Mallette, Louis Barrette, karen elaine spencer, Maël Blais, Lucas Fuglem and Adèle Fuglem
All photos: Mike Patten