A year ago, when preparing the programming for the 2001-2002 season, the year commemorating its 10th anniversary, Gallery B-312 proposed to invite a scientist to design an exhibition as a scientist. It had in mind this threefold question: how does the scientist's sensitivity intersect with that of the artist? How would the artist respond to the questions of an art-oriented scientist? and what can be discovered at the end of such an experiment? For the 4th exhibition of the six programmed in the exceptional setting of its 10th anniversary, and as a continuation of this project to explore the porosity of the boundaries between disciplines, Galerie B-312 is hosting Réciprocités, an exhibition designed by Michel Saint-Onge, a physicist by profession. How did MichelSaint-Onge do it? First of all, he recognized in the motif of nature the characteristic that science and art have always shared. But he also recognized another trait that science and art share, but this time in the form of difference; it is the incalculable. This incalculable that the scientist tends to deny, the artist seems to take the measure of it on the poetic mode. Based on this intuition, Michel Saint-Onge persuaded Sylvie Bouchard and Chantal Goulet, both painters, Sylvie Readman, photographer, and Marie A. A ceramist known for her installations, to exhibit together on the horizon of an all-scientific observation: the changes that testify to our relationship with nature are incalculable in their effects. Réciprocités was then born. The exhibition brings together original works, in which we will be able to recognize the unique mark that each of artists makes on the material, colour and light, on the space and the objects that materialize it, on time and the past that gives it consistency. But because Réciprocités stems from a desire to invoke artistic practice to evoke scientific practice, all the works are coupled with a constant: the incalculable. In art, this incalculable is circumscribed in and by the aesthetic experience that the work is capable of offering; an experience in which the spectator finds precisely the opportunity to take the measure of this incalculable. In science, the incalculable is offered to experience only in the form of the risk that is taken in the application of scientific knowledge. Réciprocités thus opens for a moment the veil of beauty over a feature of human reality in its most contradictory form: death portrayed in the form of the possible.

—Translated from a text by JEAN-ÉMILE VERDIER