Sébastian Maltais - Rêveur 1 (Détail) - 2017 - Encaustique sur bois / Encaustic on wood - 141 x 122 cm / 56 x 48 "
On this coming March 1st, Galerie Dominique Bouffard will be launching two simultaneous exhibitions. While Sylvain Lessard will be presenting his most recent work under the title « UTOPIES ET PARADIGMES » (Utopies and paradigms), Sébastian Maltais’s « LA GÉOMÉTRIE DES RÊVES » (Geometry of Dreams) will be taking place in the next room.
UTOPIES ET PARADIGMES - SYLVAIN LESSARD
March 1 to April 1, 2018
In « UTOPIES ET PARADIGMES » (Utopies and paradigms), Sylvain Lessard has focused his interest on the notion of utopia in architecture. Generally speaking, a utopia may be viewed as a futuristic proposition staging a model to be attained. Architects and artists sometimes use this language to put forward new defining paradigms that no longer fit into current normative frameworks. It is this work of pure and unconstrained exploration, expressed by means of drawings or models, that has been the wellspring of this exhibition.
Painted in acrylics in a hard-edge style, Sylvain Lessard’s new works frequently refer to utopian projects stemming from the Constructivist and Suprematist movements of early twentieth-century Russia. In a propagandistic revolutionary context, a powerful iconography meant to channel common emancipatory cultural and social values was then emerging. The works of architects Vladimir Tatlin, El Lissitzky or Yakov Chernikhov may be cited as examples.
In parallel to these past references, the pieces that round out the exhibition are more suggestive of representations of futuristic structures that might be considered contemporary utopias.
LA GÉOMÉTRIE DES RÊVES - SÉBASTIAN MALTAIS
March 1 to 25, 2018
Sébastian Maltais’s series « LA GÉOMÉTRIE DES RÊVES » (Geometry of Dreams) is the result of a recent exploration dedicated to funeral masks. For the artist, who is exploring the modalities of representation through portraiture, the challenge was to use these “object-faces” as models and to attempt to breathe an emotional charge into them.
This aim was mainly reached by painting the portrait of the « Unknown Woman of the Seine ». Found drowned in late-nineteenth-century Paris, this woman, also known as « The Beautiful Italian », was never identified despite the cast that was made of her face at the time. But the serenity that this portrait radiates has been the triggering element for the exhibition Les rêveurs, inducing the artist to replace the funereal object with contemporary live models whom he asked to close their eyes and dream.
In the "masks" series as in the "dreamers" series, the aim has been to convey an emotion, an element of inwardness belonging to the model, without drawing on the main channel tied to human emotion: the gaze. Closed within their inwardness, the faces reveal themselves differently by going through parallel paths that allow the artist to explore new creative avenues.
Painted in the encaustic technique favoured by the artist, this body of work features two works from the series of "masks" and nearly a dozen portraits from the series of "dreamers”. The entire set thus creates not only a genre dichotomy between still life and portraiture, but also an ambiguity between the tangible and the intangible, the living and the non-living.
Opening : March 1, 5 pm
Nuit Blanche @ Montréal : March 3, From 9 pm to Midnight