Valérie Blass
Hugo Brodeur
Raphaëlle De Groot
Ani Deschênes
Martin Valiquette

EXPOSITION DE JEUNES ARTISTES
06.13–06.30.1996
Gallery

The Clark Gallery concludes its season with a group exhibition featuring five emerging young artists. Their hybrid practice blurs the lines between disciplines, and their work is constructed through a constant subversion of meaning. The trivial is scrutinized, the banal is elevated. Nothing is insignificant or too ordinary.

Valérie Blass’s sculptures’ relationship to kitsch should be understood as a concern for realism. A realism that focuses on ugliness as the antagonist to beauty with its ideal proportions: kitsch as the bearer of the banal, the vulgar, the beauty of everyday life.

Hugo Brodeur explores the theme of power, currently working on the idea of ​​nation and the rituals associated with its image. His work takes shape in space through the assemblage of diverse objects and materials. By associating ideas with each object, the overall meaning becomes more complex, and interpretations multiply.

Raphaëlle de Groot transports us into the artist’s studio, into the very heart of the object’s intimate creation, contrasting the painter’s small, ever-repeated gesture with the vastness of the art system. Her work is simultaneously comprised of the object of thought and the art object, the idea of ​​surface in painting and the surface of a painting, an object, a place.

For Ani Deschênes, the created accessory comes to life. An accessory animal. This animal doesn’t merely suggest actions; it requires the viewer’s intervention to fully realize itself. To suggest life, the authenticity of certain materials is essential…

Martin Valiquette’s object-sculptures are inspired by living room furniture. Removed from their original context, these domestic elements, placed directly on the gallery floor, together or individually, constitute an anecdotal denunciation of the everyday. A striking poetry.