André Paquin

EN CHUTE LIBRE
09.04–10.05.1997

A ripple awaits us: it steals upon us—fleeting, almost imperceptible. Is our presence the cause? Then the water becomes giving once more. Yet, it has not ceased to be tumultuous. It is to this staging of ambiguity that André Paquin invites us by unfurling this vast photographic drape before our eyes. The work is constructed using a setup that invokes cinematic techniques and protocols—while subverting them—to question the ambiguity of our experience of time. Functioning as a screen (not the opalescent kind found in cinemas, but a transparent one) and as a curtain—since a play of veiling and unveiling unfolds there—the medium seems chosen to facilitate a sensory transfer, as if it were there to catch the falling water (of the Rideau Canal) depicted within it. Furthermore, this surface—divided into numerous strips of film, into as many mobile, suspended slices—establishes two scales for reading, and for registering, the time the camera captured and arrested; a time that the work’s material rustling seems to set in motion again. Translucent and permeable to movement through space and to the interplay of light and shadow, the piece places the viewer at the heart of a process that shapes an ever-shifting temporality—a musicality linking the work’s physical substance with the imagined murmur of the waterfall. Indeed, one of the work’s finest qualities lies in how it draws such a radical line between the representation and its material surface, inviting the public to bring about their reconciliation through a dialogue that renders this duration unique—yet no less elusive.

Patrice Duhamel, August 1997