JEAN-ÉMILE VERDIER
ÉVIDEM(M)ENT
Guest Curator
Jean-Émile Verdier lives and works in Montreal. He is a graduate of the Université de Montréal in art history and obtained a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris in 1988. He is currently working on the difference and repetition he recognizes between the practice of art and that of psychoanalysis. He has already taught as a lecturer in art history and theory at the Université de Montréal, UQAM, Université Laval and the University of Ottawa. He directed and participated in the publication Louis Comtois. La lumière et la Couleur (Édifions du Méridien and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 1996) and published several articles in specialized magazines.
Jean-Émile Verdier, guest curator at Galerie B-312, focuses on a specific aspect of the practice of 14 artists to help us understand the recurrence of a motif, its manifestation in various forms and the hypothesis it draws from it. Around a proposal, the works are brought together in pairs to present us with a figure of the enclosure of emptiness. This project is a reflection and a spatial setting questioning the nature of the work of art and its raison d'être. Of its nature, he will say that it "consists in the circumscription of a void", and of the reason for this gesture, that it allows "the establishment of an analytical situation". It is thus from the place of psychoanalysis (Lacanian, in particular) that he approaches the work of art as a mode of knowledge in its own right. In this ambitious project, other questions emerge, notably about the spatial arrangement of the works as well as their reception. In the text of the notebook accompanying the exhibition, Jean-Émile Verdier shares with us his views on the various discourses that are interested in artistic practice and how, from their location, a failure to understand what constitutes and the nature and raison d'être of art is taking place.
Caroline Boileau, Lise Boisseau, Magali Bouteloup, Joseph Branco, Michel Casavant, Marie-A Côté, Dorothée Deschamps, Emmanuel Galland, Suzanne Lamoureux, Emanuel Licha, Jean Marois, Fabrizio Perozzi, Lucie Robert, Geneviève Rocher.
Jean-Émile Verdier lives and works in Montreal. He is a graduate of the Université de Montréal in art history and obtained a D.E.A. from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales de Paris in 1988. He is currently working on the difference and repetition he recognizes between the practice of art and that of psychoanalysis. He has already taught as a lecturer in art history and theory at the Université de Montréal, UQAM, Université Laval and the University of Ottawa. He directed and participated in the publication Louis Comtois. La lumière et la Couleur (Édifions du Méridien and the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, 1996) and published several articles in specialized magazines.