Gallery B-312 welcomes Francine Desmeules in the large room Paysages temporaires. The exhibition brings together a series of images that immediately suggest the landscape, either by format or motif. The supports and the material are very thin. Bright colours, very dense blacks and clear contrasts are the first to stand out. Nothing is fixed, the images seem to have been made to express a gesture, a movement, both parallel and perpendicular to the surface of the images. But patterns emerge, pixels too. The image is photographic. Francine Desmeules has captured moving landscapes. The shutter release speeds were slow enough to reduce the referent to chromatic differences that became increasingly intertwined. By hiding itself in this way, the referent lets the matter organize itself in a way other than around a motif - so a narrative is organized, a narrative for the eyes. Each image is organized around a tension that is different each time between poles that oppose without excluding each other. For example, in large formats photography calls for painting, but the opposite is also true, when a pictorial gesture appears in the photographic motif of speed. And then, in the dyptych bringing together these two very dark images, the eye slowly takes note of the shades of grey, and ends up discovering two photographic motifs that dynamize the images differently, one inciting the eye to deepen the image, the other, on the contrary, forbidding such a possibility. How can I put it? Opposites are in dialogue, both within and between the works: dark and light, bright colour and deep black, scrolling and stillness, digging and flatness, motif and its erasure. Paysages temporaires emerge from a kind of primordial dialogue between the stubborn presence of reality and an inescapable sensitivity for the indecipherable.

—Translated from a text by Jean-Émile Verdier et Émilie Renaud Roy