Lieux de rencontre | Group exhibition
Lieux de rencontre (Gathering places) | Group exhibition
Artists: Valérie Gobeil, John Maull, Ezekiel Messou, Olivier Moisan-Dufour, Moe Piuze
Dates: June 17 to July 17, 2021
Whether it is the simple drawing of a line, a play of texture or a dialogue between the full and the empty, the work of art suggests a sensory experience. Five artists (from Canada, the United States and Benin) attempt to propose a connection: art as a vehicle of the quest for meaning, which, if the viewer pauses, becomes the scene of an encounter.
Valérie Gobeil lives and works in Montreal. Her artistic approach consists in researching the pictorial potential of textiles and fibre. Her concerns are strictly formal and do not rely on a visual reality. She questions textiles as one might question painting in a self-referential way. Going beyond its utilitarian functions of clothing and tool in everyday life and thinking about the properties of the material for what it is intrinsically. Questioning colour, composition, textures and patterns allows her to open new paths of exploration. It results in tactile works with colourful organic forms where spaces intermingle and create new dialogues.
Born in Los Angeles, John Maull has been working in the progressive art studios of Tierra del Sol since 2005. He traces floral and colourful patterns with pencils, markers, ballpoint pens or paint. Layer after layer, he favours movement over pattern, driven by a desire to express the emotions that flow through him. Maull’s semi-abstract language reveals his passion for nature, but also the joy that drives him when he creates. There is also the presence of an alphabet of his own; recurring traces of a desire to sign his work.
Ezekiel Messou, an artist from Benin, a great specialist in repairing and drawing sewing machines, proposes a plastic correlation between technical drawing and artwork. Inside his sewing machine repair workshop, out of sight, Ezekiel Messou fills school notebooks, A5 format, squared to the millimetre, in which he lists the models of sewing machines. Born in 1971, Ezekiel Messou is not a very diligent student. At the age of sixteen, he fled his authoritarian father and left for Nigeria. From 1990 to 1995, he learned the trade of sewing machine repair in Lagos. His choice fell on the mechanics of sewing machines because, as he says: “There are too many fishermen, tailors or masons on the lake, while no one can do this job …”
Quebec artist Olivier Moisan-Dufour proposes a direct discussion between painting and sculpture. His creative process begins with the spontaneous and intuitive construction of sculptural works generally made of recycled wood, followed by a pictorial translation. A prodigy of hyper-realistic painting, he renders on the canvas every detail of the said works, the play of light and the quality of the material. The relationship between presentation and representation creates a duality, a dialogue that allows him to question the art object in its most singular form.
Originally from Rawdon (Canada), Moe Piuze plays with the question of identity. To create his new series of small works, he reached out to a community and asked for donations of wood, the material he needed to create them. All the pieces are thus made of reclaimed wood (some century old), and addresses several joint subjects such as the body, the house, and the landscape. The idea of territory is imprinted on each irregularity of the wood he chooses, but also through his unique approach to assemblage. The domestic and the intimate intertwine to create a playful narrative and a very poetic testimony of his daily life.
