L’esthétique de l’existence L’existence de l’esthétique 2011

Géographie imaginaire, Maison de la Culture Notre Dame-De-Grâce, Montreal, QC, Canada
Paper/Veil, natural light, text, brass leaf, acrylic tube — Ø 400 x 350 cm — Integrated in exhibition space.

‘‘On the upper floor, Gilles Morissette invites us to other journeys, to other displacements between intimacy and public, mental place and constructed place, perennity and precariousness. Japanese-style paper screens are laid out like a circular tent or rather like a horseshoe. They delimit an interior space. When entering, the spectator experiences the shimmering movements of light through the alternating opaque and transparent zones on the surface of the paper. This device isolates him and keeps him at a distance at the same time as it makes him glimpse and experience differently the external areas that delimit it. We are at the same time here and there, enclosed in this close bubble and projected beyond this translucent wall which surrounds us. In resonance, the words of a sentence inscribed with gold leaf on the paper come back in a loop: The existence of aesthetics / The aesthetics of existence ... And so on.

Focusing on mobility, interaction, the exhibition leads us to see space, not as a vacant and empty category to be invested, but well beyond this neutrality as an active principle in the formation of identities and the coalescence of expressions."

© René Viau 2011, Excerpt from Géographie imaginaire, Montreal, Canada