PROVOQUER | ÉTATS FLUIDES : ENTRE LA DURETÉ DU FAIRE ET LA DÉLICATESSE DES FARDS À JOUES

La Maison Pierre-Chartrand is pleased to present Provoke | Fluid States in collaboration with the Conseil des arts de Montréal and Galerie B-312, which, to celebrate its 30th anniversary, has invited Maude Arès, a 30-year-old artist, and Massimo Guerrera, an artist with a 30-year career, to explore time as a matter of practice.—They did not know each other before this invitation. The foundation of their proposal was built from this very unknowing. Walks around their workshops laid the beginnings of collaborative work. Through these wanderings and getting to know each other, the gathering of objects has become a way of questioning material vitalities, their transformations and routes.—These forgotten, abandoned objects, littering the edges of a street or railway, are always charged with character. They carry their own story, which evolves once chosen by the artists. When they are brought back to the studio space, they are intertwined with previously gathered clay, wood, oil and bits of string. Discoveries are made in these gazes, attentive to the silences and sounds of things. Fluidity, fragility, malleability. Hardness, roughness, resistance.—Complicities are established in this continuum of time, materials and spaces. The artists sort, classify, prepare, shape and assemble these nearly nothings. During this fluid collaboration process, invisible bonds are woven. Breath, presence. Two practices, two artists, at a crossroads. From these moments-exchanges emerge fluid-sculptures, suspended-sculptures and tool-sculptures, the latter being used to draw large landscape drawings that unfold in the gallery space.—These poetic objects are eminently political. What do these debris-strewn wastelands reveal? When does an object become a circle of life rather than a piece of scrap? How and what do we consume? How does this act of collecting and assembling become a marker of time, at once singular, extensible and compressible? What is concealed by this proposal, modulated by four hands, whose form is never final, always in motion?—At the Maison Pierre-Chartrand, in pursuit of this exploration of collaborative forms, the artists invite one of the project’s curators, Marthe Carrier, to participate in the dialogue and installation space.

—MARTHE CARRIER
CURATOR OF THE TOURING PROGRAM