Marie-Claire Blais and Caroline Cloutier return to the Fondation in the Spring of 2021 to complete their contract, as agreed despite the pandemic’s disruption of the first part of their joint residency. This time, it’s Marie-Claire who takes the lead role, following on from the sound work De gauche à droite, de marbre et de bois she presented last spring in the safe of the banque-atelier, where Caroline, in counterpoint, will in turn be confined to install new photographic experiments.
Marie-Claire Blais: Inner Horizons
“We must constantly maintain the balance between the horizon that has disappeared and the horizon that is imagined.”
– Roland Giguère
The artist had repeatedly told us that the two lines of the poet quoted above would haunt her during the design and production of her installation in the Foundation’s Great Hall. Yet she knew that a horizon line was far from being a favourite motif in Molinari’s work. Let alone two superimposed horizon lines…
Marie-Claire Blais’s sculpture takes advantage of all the architect’s skill at home and takes the form of a cone of vision cut in two, each part of which constitutes a straight line where a vertical element is repeated, judiciously placed so as to indicate a perspective, until it fades into the horizon. The two lines intersect exactly in the middle of the room. We are reminded of Serge Murphy’s comment about the artist’s drawings: “Here we are dealing as much with a deconstruction in progress as with a construction in the making.”
Molinari’s spirit is evident in the repetition of a vertical motif and, more subtly, in the reference to a Mondrian painting (Pier and Ocean #9, 1915) that helped trigger this polysemic project. Finally, this structure, which evokes a beautiful but relatively austere drawing in space, will be placed on a large coloured rectangle, formed of strips of canvas “in a certain order assembled”, so as to suggest an abstract landscape or fragments of sky. All of which makes the viewer-promoter reflect on the function of the two horizon lines that do more than simply underpin the vertical rods…
Caroline Cloutier: Fragments
In my works,” the artist repeats, “I offer spaces to project whatever we want. This is convenient when her refined, technically impeccable images are presented soberly in matching spaces, in white cubes. But not so in the old vault of Molinari’s former bank, with its walls considerably dilapidated and carefully preserved as such, for all sorts of reasons. There will be no continuity between the image and the out-of-frame, all the more so as Caroline Cloutier is currently working with frosted glass plates, which are especially sensitive to light, and her works are more delicate and uncluttered than ever. In this case, there will be two, unframed, printed on large sheets and hung along the walls. The sanitized compositions are surrounded by a generous margin, as if to create a zone of silence between them and the capricious, psychologically-charged space of the vault. A beautiful dialogue in prospect…
View the exhibition flyer below:
