Number 49, Winter 1999

EN:

Paradoxical: This is how Sylvain Campeau defines the works of Robert ParkeHarrison. It is a paradox of a Resurrection that cannot help but take part in the Apocalypse; the paradox of the uncontrollable destruction of our nourishing Earth, enslaved by the gradual yet inexorable advent of industrial development but counterbalanced by an effect of regeneration of all life, whatever will happen to it; images of deforested, impoverished, arid land, symbolizing the march of death, which introduce, in spite of everything, a form of life through animated machinery, like the androids of our famous predecessors (among them the future "Eves" of Villiers de l'lsle-Adams and Fritz Lang's in Metropolis). We do not emerge unscathed from these images. Only an indestructible faith in life enables us to pass through the emotional states - mourning, melancholy, utopia -provoked by ParkeHarrison's "machine-humans" or " human-machines.

EN:

The multi-paneled, serial works in Curiosité - Le chercheur de trésor were the last made by Robert Pelleter before his death. They were conceived from the débris of civilization, and many of them are enigmatic. With the intention of exaggerating the magnificence of rejected objects, he photographed their shape, their shades, and the deposits of sediments that covered them in a warm, brilliant light, bringing out many details that were invisible to the naked eye.The authors discuss the idea that the artist, beyond his aesthetic infatuation with these vestiges, brought out the feeling of an experience born of sleep through the metaphoric device of image-objects. They refer to the thoughts of psychoanalyst Serge Tisseron, for whom objects are fundamentally extensions of our minds, images are also objects, and it is up to the individual to decide whether an object has something to say to him or her.

EN:

Fonds culinaire is a photographic stock-taking of the physical congestion caused by kitchen objects. Since 1990, Johanne Gagnon has been working on creating a legitimate description of a kitchen from an exact knowledge of everything that is likely to define the function of this room in the house, from its foundations to the colour of the tiling to the space that each object in it takes up. The work shows, in a fictional representation, the impossibility of projecting a future reality from an exact knowledge of a reality that is lived, perceived, and felt, because such a representation can only result in the representation of a future reality that is frozen and closed to the unforeseen. Fonds culinaire forces this realization, from which a more general conclusion can be drawn: the imaginary cannot be inferred from the real.