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Marie-Eve Beaulieu

ET SI ON RECOMMENÇAIT ?

Exposition
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Image
© Marie-Eve Beaulieu

Holder of a master's degree in visual and media arts from UQAM (2014), Marie-Eve Beaulieu participated in several group exhibitions (Parisian Laundry, Art Mûr, Galerie Lilian Rodriguez) before being represented by the Galerie Simon Blais since 2014. His work was exhibited in Germany as well during the ambitious Leipzig-Montréal project (2013), bringing together a dozen artists from Saxony and Quebec. Recipient of the McAbbie Excellence Scholarship (2005) and the Sylvie and Simon Blais Prize for emerging artists in visual arts (2013), she has recently benefited from the support of the Canada Council for the Arts (2020). Born in Hauterive on the North Shore, she has lived and worked in Montreal for about twenty years.

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In her new exhibition, Marie-Eve Beaulieu revisits 15 years of her career by recovering old paintings and sketches, from which she cuts the canvas into tiny squares, which she then weaves. The initial questioning of Et si on recommençait ? (What if we started again?) is ethical and questions the gestures of the artist who collects materials and produces works that accumulate over the years. Desiring to recover as much as possible, down to the medium and the varnish, the structure springs from the material itself: the square is a stable shape which helps the composition and recalls the grid; weaving allows you to pull on the threads to give it a shape. Thus, the main piece, which fits into the architecture of the exhibition room and takes advantage of natural light, is the product of the combination of a few tens of thousands of small squares which constitute one work, which is artisanal and monumental at the same time. Reminiscent of quilting, aesthetically and conceptually, the manual gesture is highlighted and is privileged over the machine. What comes to light is a labour and a rigor that shows the stubbornness and which gives an effect of vertigo or astonishment by the collecting the fragments. Although the installation aspect innovates and seems different in its approach, several interests of the painter remain clearly visible, such as the importance given to abstraction, materiality, gesture, repetition and illegibility. In a similar way to covering her paintings before scratching them to reveal, in part, what is hidden, Marie-Eve Beaulieu shows around forty of her art works with this project, but the spectator only partially accesses them, because of the radical method and the structure. Starting from a reflection on the environment and using the past to project herself into the future, the artist questions the process and the material, but above all, takes a personal look at the possibilities of reconstructing oneself through time and its investment. To be experienced in the large room of the Galerie B-312 until October 22, 2022.

JOANNIE BOULAIS 
[free translation]

 

Holder of a master's degree in visual and media arts from UQAM (2014), Marie-Eve Beaulieu participated in several group exhibitions (Parisian Laundry, Art Mûr, Galerie Lilian Rodriguez) before being represented by the Galerie Simon Blais since 2014. His work was exhibited in Germany as well during the ambitious Leipzig-Montréal project (2013), bringing together a dozen artists from Saxony and Quebec. Recipient of the McAbbie Excellence Scholarship (2005) and the Sylvie and Simon Blais Prize for emerging artists in visual arts (2013), she has recently benefited from the support of the Canada Council for the Arts (2020). Born in Hauterive on the North Shore, she has lived and worked in Montreal for about twenty years.