What is a geranium? Is it a wild plant or an ornamental, cultivated or domesticated plant? Nature or culture? Beyond our desire to respect nature is our inevitable presence: we are there, we exist, and while taking a step backwards is unthinkable, wishing for our disappearance is absurd. Because we are there, with our cultural baggage, we must learn to live in harmony with nature — a pressing task, Luce Pelletier reminds us. To lead us to that point, she invites us to become sensible to the manifestations of life: to plants, animals, light, textures, motifs — in short, to employour senses and sensitivity. Deriving from her years spent in a rural environment in Montérégie, her installation Toucher l’instant joins contemporary sculpture and textiles, clippings and digital images, opacity and transparency, the living and the inert, manual labour and new technologies. By bringing a variety oftechniques and materials into the present day, she creates new relationships with objects and the environment.

Presentation by Luce Pelletier on saturday, September 10, at 2pm
Opening \ Launch on Saturday, September 10, at 3pm

Taking as its starting point questions around transportation and mobility, the installation Le monde est un zombie explores the phantasmagorical dimension of reality through an imposing shipping container. This object evokes the history of industrialisation and mass culture, phenomena that Simon Bilodeau investigates by way of contemporary simulacra. The container, a mobile interface between various spaces—physical, virtual and symbolic—transports with it the vestiges of a mysterious world, one wavering dangerously between survival and disappearance. By way of response to this temporal ambiguity, a tension between enchantment and disenchantment drives Bilodeau’s project, which like all his work includes an important painting component. The exhibition being presented at EXPRESSION inaugurates the second phase of Le monde est un zombie, the first part of which was shown at Laval’s Maison des arts in 2011. With this new show, the artist and curator take the concept mobility on which the project rests even further, while at the same time taking into account the specificities of the exhibition site. The collaboration between Bilodeau and Katrie Chagnon thus continues through new ideas about the conditions of displacement, about “coming back to earth” and about the reproduction of works of art.

The works in this exhibition originate, in the words of the artist, in pools of colours which slowly spread and intermingle, becoming vast, uneven expanses through a difficult to control dynamic of fluids. With this series of new paintings, Dominique Gaucher abandons his usual desire to control, foresee and plan everything, reacting instead to what occurs on the canvas. Open to this loss of control, he thus forces himself at times to follow to the very end the paths he wanders down. To take liberties and to experience the unpredictable. This two-part exhibition thus shows the two sides of an approach which moves back and forth between excessiveness—blind ambition, insolence—and a reprimand of this excessiveness—divine vengeance which reveals human frailty in the face of the power of the elements. Hence the title of the exhibition, Hybris et Némésis.

For the past twenty years, the painter Richard Deschênes has been skilfully taking apart the phenomenon of perception and, in so doing, has brought viewers to consider the question of the process by which images are made, the role of memory and the psychology of cognition. What do we perceive? he reminds us. The object, the material, or only the simulacrum, the image of that object, that material? On this point, he remarks: "My painting is of much greater physical than psychic consequence".

The multidisciplinary artist Guy Laramée inquires into the degradation of cultures, the myth of knowledge versus ignorance, and rupture and continuity in art. These questions unavoidably spring out of his work, which always depicts a landscape. These works invite silence, spirituality and contemplation. His series construct various myths—stories linking the past, present and future. One of his most powerful influences is the German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840).