UN SOLEIL DIFFICILE | FRANÇOIS LEMIEUX

This new exhibition of works by François Lemieux, which includes a film made specifically for the occasion, examines the multiple uses of the metaphor of transparency, and the changes it has undergone since the 1920s. In glass architecture, transparency initially was a symbol of a positive social transformation—a radical political emancipation, even—before undergoing rapid evolution and transfiguration, eventually nurturing a fair share of the dreams of objectivity, optimization, fluidity, acceleration and hygiene so characteristic of our modern world. Through the meaning, the paradoxes and the imagery that it mobilizes, transparency informs not only contemporary ethical and political representations but also industrial aesthetics, architecture, communications, as well as abstract algorithmical and statistical machines. It is the embodiment of a new, mythical, entirely “wired” space, as seen in the connectivity of smart cities, cloud-based informatics, and big data: a world emancipated from the material, that has become transparent to itself. Using these perceptible evidences, the exhibition seeks to identify what the concept of transparency can tell us about the dreams that haunt the era we live in.

Photo: François Lemieux, still extract from “Un soleil difficile”, 2016. Courtesy of the artist.