ORANGE - IL NOSTRO GUSTO
Contemporary Art Event of Saint-Hyacinthe - 3^rd edition

Among those artists interested in the various aspects of the agri-food sector, many also consider the ethical issues raised by this topic. The purpose of contemporary art is certainly not to focus on ethics or morality, and yet today we observe a trend in this direction. These artists, like the society in which they live, are increasingly smitten with ethical questions and directly challenge us by calling into question our way of cultivating the land, which often weakens the environment and threatens its equilibrium. By extension, our eating habits are also called into question, shaking up the foundations of why and how we carry out our everyday activities. Taking this observation as our starting point, it seemed to the curators essential to pursue these moral and ethical ideas without losing sight of the consequences they have on the aesthetics of the works of art in question. It was thus in this spirit that they invited thirteen artists from Quebec, the rest of Canada and abroad to participate in ORANGE—IL NOSTRO GUSTO (meaning our taste in Italian).

Opening night on September 11, 2009 at 7 pm
Presentation all day on September 26, starting at 10 am

Visit ORANGE 3 website

For the past ten years, the Rimouski-born Montreal artist Gwenaël Bélanger has been pushing back the boundaries of the off screen in his enquiries into the image. Through close and critical observation of what an image is in our everyday lives, he puts the boundaries of our perception of reality to use in his graphic and photographic techniques. Like an anthropologist, Bélanger is interested in the polysemous content of the mediated image and the cultural object. This exhibition, organised by the curator Yann Pocreau, will present an overview of Gwenaël Bélanger’s work and is produced in collaboration with the Musée régional de Rimouski, where it will be presented from 4 February to 4 March 2010. It is also accompanied by a publication.

Since the early 1990s, the Montreal artist Lucie Robert has been working on the creative process, juxtaposing artisanal techniques and conventional artistic techniques to create a dialectic between inside and out, content and container, right side up and upside down. The exhibition at EXPRESSION presents a body of drawing and videos articulated around the theme of interdependence and the act of drawing. By means of a tactile approach to drawing, one which privileges marks, traces and imprints, Robert seeks to express the bonding relationship between mother and child during pregnancy and the separation experienced afterwards. The result is a series of drawings in which the cube, a reference to the body and a central theme in the artist’s work, is revealed rather than invented, is fragmentary and deconstructed. The temporality of the drawing becomes apparent in simple gestures—rubbing, touching, scratching, stitching, tearing—which accumulate in sequences of traces on the surface of the paper, a sensitive surface likened to the epidermis of the skin.

The work of Eric Cardinal, an artist from the Eastern Townships region, is characterised by the accumulation, transformation and assemblage of everyday objects of every description. Through this process, he creates an immediate relationship with the materiality of his work, rather than an expectation that it will render a message of some sort. From this perspective, the formal transformations in his work, through which innocuous objects become works of art, create enough distance between what these objects represented initially and what they have become. For the exhibition at EXPRESSION, Eric Cardinal puts aside the object manipulated by a series of simple and spontaneous gestures and is more interested in the material itself. By means of a slow and controlled manipulation, he inaugurates a second phase in his work: the forms and textures obtained are translated into other materials, giving rise to a new concept of the work of art.

Architecture is often at stake in the work of the Montreal artist Alexandre David. Indeed his work seems to take architecture, from its representation in drawing form to its perception by the viewer, as the starting point for thinking about our relationship with the built world. David does not work on essence but rather carries out transformations of and additions to space, creating a discrepancy between form and matter from the drawing to the experience. In keeping with this practice, the exhibition of his work presented at EXPRESSION is conceived as the generation of a site, with its open and closed spaces, which takes shape through the use of objects in the gallery space. Only by moving through this constructed space can the visitor discover each of the elements making up the whole.