LA CELLULE

Galerie B-312 is pleased to present the most recent exhibition of Mathieu Latulippe in its main space. The artist explores the links between the world of medicine and the environment - particularly the romantic conception of well-being and health care and its relation to architecture, landscape and nature. Romanticism - an intellectual movement of the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries, opposing the omnipotence of rationality, and leaving feeling and imagination to take over critical analysis - historically corresponds to the apogee of the epidemic of tuberculosis. Incurable disease until the discovery of the first antibiotics, the doctors of the time sought on the side of air quality as a possible cause and remedy for this infectious lung disease. This is how a new type of healthy architecture was born. The sanatoriums, located in mountains, combined the freshness of the air, the places of impeccable hygiene and rooms with balconies allowing a remedy of sun and natural light. The persistent notoriety of these places of care may be due to the fact that literature is rich in narratives set in such locations. The Magic Mountain of Thomas Mann is undoubtedly the best-known example.—With La Cellule, Mathieu Latulippe casts a dystopian glance on our cultural and societal behaviors towards health care, still cradled by romanticism, but exceedingly perceived as individual stakes dissociated from the external environment. Wellness is a commitment to self, a personal responsibility, and now more than ever, a very lucrative market. Beyond the disease prevention, we seek new elixirs facilitating the detoxification of our systems, in order to increase our vital energy to match the new subjective and performative criteria of lifestyle. In regards to health, we no longer seek the prolongation of life, but its intensification. Mixing models, medical archives and sci-fi images, the artist invites us to revisit our perceptions of the healthy and the unhealthy by reassessing certain mythological constructions of health and the presumptions that flow from them. An original project that you may not come out of intact!

 — Original text in French by ISABELLE GUIMOND