Marie-Claire Blais : Entrouvrir, Entrevoir, Enclore

Opening: Tuesday, November 28, 6pm
Guided visit in the presence of the artist and the curator (by reservation only): reservation@canada-culture.org

Curator: Catherine Bédard

This exhibition of the work of a rising figure on the Canadian contemporary art scene will be the last one held at 5 rue de Constantine before the Canadian Cultural Centre moves to Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.

It brings together a group of works representing a reflection on space and place, focusing on the passage. The choice of exhibition in itself constitutes a symbolic act exploring the issues raised by a place, the Canadian Cultural Centre, itself imbued with a symbolic dimension in which the cultural and the political are, inevitably, closely intertwined.

An artist who had trained as an architect and with a special passion for the study of landscape, Marie-Claire Blais explores the field of the visible as the expression of our relationship to the world. She analyzes the superficiality or complexity of this field, unpicks its thread, then invites us to enter secret worlds that appear to be chinks in our real world.  

Entrouvrir, entrevoir, enclore is based on two series of paintings, Tracé d'un clair obscur (plaster on panel, 2015), monochrome variations on a sideways motion that evokes a wave and a lifeline, the cumulative of a slight disturbance on an initial structure, and Être la porte qui s'ouvre (acrylic on canvas, 2016–17), which gives us access to perfectly ambiguous and contradictory spaces, in which reliefs are transformed into hollows and vice versa. Between these two series, which have as a starting point a reflection on the time and space of movement as well as the necessity of its end, and the light shed on the memory of modernity (from the blue and pink frescoes of the precursors of Italian perspective to the modernist grids of American art). 

In partnership with the Galerie René Blouin, Montreal