ÉRIC CARDINAL | Amas, fatras, îlots

ÉRIC CARDINAL | Amas, fatras, îlots

Room 2

Éric Cardinal

AMAS, FATRAS, ÎLOTS

EXHIBITION /
FEBRUARY 21 TO MARCH 29, 2008

Toothpicks, paper bags, steel wool, adhesive tape, chairs, occasional furniture, scraps of cardboard, tie-wraps and many other easy-to-find objects - or those simply tossed aside on his studio floor - become images in Éric Cardinal's work. They are attached, glued, plastered, brought together to “try to exist” in their new forms. The elements that make up these sculptures are, for the most part, disposable, replaceable - and here no effort is made to recycle them. They take on sense in their amalgamation, their quantity, in the weight of their boundless consumption and their - sometimes minimal - transformation. They are, says the artist, “consumable and fungible, therefore, ephemeral and infinite.” These objects evoke and do not try to show, nor - how much less - to criticize. They are best understood in the encounter of their forms, and they appeal to an internal logic of the ensemble to generate aesthetic micro-situations.

Cardinal is particularly interested in the formal potential of these objects and - without any hierarchy of value - in the materials of which they are made up. In the gallery, dozens of accumulated sculptures create all kinds of organic mass. The piles of matter transform and interpenetrate, give place to protean and carnivorous structures that seem to strain here and there and contaminate each other, or decompose. Eric Cardinal's hybridizations are to be approached eye to eye. They offer themselves up like a rigged botany, one resistant, not to say impenetrable, to any rigorous taxonomy. They are understood in their disjunctions and for their plastic proprieties, their formal ruptures… as one might approach the study of an extraordinarily rare garden and the obscure species found therein.

YP
Translated by PduB

The artist wishes to thank
the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec