SÉBASTIAN MALTAIS | LA GÉOMÉTRIE DES RÊVES

From March 1st till 25th, 2018.

Sébastian Maltais’s series “La géométrie des rêves” (Geometry of Dreams) is the result of a recent exploration dedicated to funeral masks. For the artist, who is exploring the modalities of representation through portraiture, the challenge was to use these “object-faces” as models and to attempt to breathe an emotional charge into them.

This aim was mainly reached by painting the portrait of the “Unknown Woman of the Seine”. Found drowned in late-nineteenth-century Paris, this woman, also known as “The Beautiful Italian”, was never identified despite the cast that was made of her face at the time. But the serenity that this portrait radiates has been the triggering element for the exhibition Les rêveurs, inducing the artist to replace the funereal object with contemporary live models whom he asked to close their eyes and dream.

Painted in the encaustic technique favoured by the artist, this body of work features two works from the series of “masks” and nearly a dozen portraits from the series of “dreamers”. The entire set thus creates not only a genre dichotomy between still life and portraiture, but also an ambiguity between the tangible and the intangible, the living and the non-living.

Opening on March 1st at 5 p.m.
Nuit Blanche à Montréal : open on March 3rd, from 9 p.m. to midnight.