The Materiality of Colour

Ciel variable 111 - THE SPACE OF COLOUR | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2019] By Jacques Doyon From the manipulation of light (through decomposition, combination of layers, or diffraction effects) to work on the supporting medium (film, photographic paper, walls) to searching out pictorial compositions on city streets, a space of exploration opens up for photography around the various manifestations of colour. The result is images that […]

Louise Déry. Hosting and Presenting of the Exhibition Uprisings – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Louise Déry

[Fall 2018] Louise Déry holds a PhD in art history and has been director of the Galerie de l’UQAM (Université du Québec à Montréal) since 1997; previously, she was director of the Musée régional de Rimouski and curator of contemporary art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Montreal Museum of Fine […]

Crossing Borders

Ciel variable 110 - MIGRATION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2018] By Jacques Doyon More than thresholds, borders have become a kind of non-place – extra-national zones – where migrants’ identities and statuses are examined and held in suspension for periods that are increasingly long and undetermined. In this issue, we examine certain aspects of the crossing of borders with works that explore how […]

Reactivated Memories

Ciel variable 109 - REVISIT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

The works brought together in this issue look back at events in relatively recent history that have reverberated to the present day. These are prolific works, with multiple iterations, embodied in artistic forms and processes that reflect the complexity of their subjects: the mobility of fragments of the Berlin Wall, the exhibition at the Christian […]

Making visible

Ciel variable 108 - GOING PUBLIC | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2018] By Jacques Doyon This issue’s thematic section presents works that come from a wide variety of places and times, but all are marked by the notion of public visibility. These three bodies of work cover a wide spectrum of what defines the public space for artistic expression, ranging from the concrete civic and […]

Three Moments of Ruin

Ciel variable 107 - RUINS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2017] The artists whose works are brought together here under the theme of ruins are interested in capturing the traces of a disappearing world, a world in which the evolution of the photographic image is symptomatic of a more fundamental transformation of culture and social values as a whole. These are the ruins that […]

Metonymic Motifs

Ciel variable 106 - TREES, ICE, AND CLOUDS | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alain Lefort, Denis Farley, Jocelyn Philibert

Each series of images in this issue presents, in a way, work on a motif – a live view of the landscape, in the tradition of landscape painters. Capturing the infinite variations of trees, icebergs, or clouds under different conditions certainly testifies to an interest in nature, but perhaps even more in how it is […]

Hélène Samson, Exhibiting Notman – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Interviews
Authors: Hélène Samson, Jacques Doyon | Artists: William Notman

[Winter 2017] Hélène Samson has been the curator of the photography collection at the McCord Museum since 2006. She is interested in collecting vernacular Canadian photographs and updating nineteenth-century photographic archives. She has just edited a book produced by the McCord Museum and Éditions Hazan (Paris) on the work of Canadian photographer William Notman (1826–91), […]

Montrealities

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Claire Beaugrand-Champagne, Clara Gutsche, David Miller, Gabor Szilasi, Michel Campeau, Miki Gingras, Patrick Dionne, Robert Walker, Roger Charbonneau

[Winter 2017] Over the years, many photographers have explored Montreal and its neighbourhoods. Their images have captured portraits of residents, the colour and composition of the streets and commercial arteries, and the mixture of cultures that contribute to the quality and diversity of a city, as well as the commitment of residents who create the […]

Neighbourhood Lives

Ciel variable 105 – MONTREALITIES | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

[Winter 2017] It is particularly interesting to present the series of images that Robert Walker has made on the subject of the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood – where he was born and currently lives – in light of the festivities for Montreal’s 375th anniversary. The focus of these celebrations – optimistic and perhaps a bit facile – […]

Bénédicte Ramade, The Edge of the Earth, Climate Change in Photography and Video – An interview by Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Essays, Interviews
Authors: Bénédicte Ramade, Jacques Doyon

[Fall 2016] Ryerson Image Centre, Toronto Guest Curator: Bénédicte Ramade An interview by Jacques Doyon [Excerpt] On September 14, 2016, the Ryerson Image Centre in Toronto inaugurated an exhibition titled The Edge of the Earth – Climate Change in Photography and Video, featuring works by more than twenty contemporary artists from Canada and abroad, as […]

From Another Angle

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] With great sensitivity and remarkable image quality, the works brought together in this section offer a renewed gaze at discredited realities and experiences. They do this by showing us people in their living environments. And yet, it is not individuals that these works offer as much as a certain order of representation, certain […]

Another look at things

Ciel variable 104 - FROM ANOTHER ANGLE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Marisa Portolese, Yoanis Menge

[Fall 2016] The works in this issue’s thematic section are anchored in realities diametrically opposed to each other – the seal hunt, social marginality, and representation of women – and are from different times. These works nevertheless come together in their challenging of prejudices and dominant thought systems. In fact, each proposes to portray people […]

This Nature that Is Our World

Ciel variable 103 - NATURE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Geneviève Chevalier, Isabelle Hayeur, Jessica Auer

[Spring/Summer 2016] There are places where nature’s presence is more intensely felt, where the question of the city’s interrelations with its natural environment emerges more spontaneously. Certain circumstances are also conducive to raising such reflections – among them, sense of unfamiliarity experienced during a stay abroad, obvious deterioration in the equilibrium or beauty of a […]

Far Away, So Close

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April

[Winter 2016]   Globalization is making us more aware of the realities of the entire planet through news, visits, and business travel. In addition, urbanization and consumer markets are tending to bring cultures and lifestyles ever closer to each other. Even so, and fortunately, diversity and differences remain. What is more, the most radical forms […]

Far Away, So Close…

Ciel variable 102 - FAR AWAY, SO CLOSE | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Alejandro Cartagena, Julian Germain, Raymonde April

[Winter 2016]   What can hold things together and forge intersections in universes as different as the ones gathered in these pages, if it is not that they address a few aspects of our common condition that is increasingly shaped by the current path of globalization? The opening of borders in the contemporary era, inaugurated […]

Fantasizing

Ciel variable 101 - STRATA | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Is fantasizing always diametrically opposed to the truth? Or does it tend to become an inherent component of reality – to blend with it, be superimposed on it – to the point that the two shape each other? The recent Bugingo affair – involving a Montreal journalist who apparently invented a series of facts and […]

Replay

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Adad Hannah, Althea Thauberger, Chuck Samuels, Denys Arcand

Appropriating visual artworks, as one interprets the works in a repertoire: here, a sculpture by Rodin, self-portraits of famous photographers, and a play whose writing is attributed, as part of the fiction, to an author of another era. Judging that, among all the works that exist, these ones still resonate sufficiently in the eyes and […]

CV100! . . . And what comes next?

Ciel variable 100 - REPLAY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

Publishing a contemporary art magazine specializing in photography in 2015 is more relevant than ever. Simply think of all the magazines, galleries, exhibition centres, and events (Mois de la photo and photographic encounters of all kinds) that exist and are being created all over the world around the photographic image. Of course, the time has […]

Vincent Lafrance ART SYSTÈME. Magazine d’art et d’idées – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Vincent Lafrance

November 18, 2015 [originally published Winter 2015] — Vincent Lafrance’s work is permeated with the idea of the simulacrum – perception and its faults. Playing with photographic virtuosity and with randomness, he composes visual illusions with traditional photographic means. His body of videographic work uses language as a confusing effect; he produces fictions that fluidly meander between …

Environments

Ciel variable 99 - HABITAT | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon

We are pleased to present in this issue the first thematic section put together by Alexis Desgagnés in his new position as associate editor of the magazine. The section, bearing on the notion of habitat, juxtaposes recent works by photographers Normand Rajotte and Stephen Gill, each of whom stands out for a field practice adapted […]

The Analogue and the Abstract

Ciel variable 98 – ABSTRACTION | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Henri Venne, Jacinthe Lessard-L., Jon Knowles, Lorna Bauer, Thomas Ruff

Each in its way, the works in this issue’s portfolio speak of photography and analogue images by inscribing them in other artistic media (digital simulation, film, video, sculpture, painting). The imprint of light is thus materialized in abstract, simplified forms that multiply the images’ referential registers while relativizing the privileged link between photography and the […]

Martha Langford, About Speaking of Photography – Jacques Doyon

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Interviews
Authors: Jacques Doyon, Martha Langford | Artists: Clifford Owens

September 5, 2018 [originally published in CV97 in Spring 2014] — Martha Langford is the research chair and director of the Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Institute for Studies in Canadian Art and a professor of art history at Concordia University in Montreal. Her books on photography include Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (2001); Scissors, Paper, Stone: Expressions of Memory in Contemporary Photographic Art (2007)…

Dignity and Distinction

Ciel variable 97 - PORTRAIT GALLERY | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Christian Tagliavini, Gabriel Coutu-Dumont, Pierre Gonnord

What, in fact, could the people (gypsies, miners, aristocrats, models, night owls, and others) gathered here in portraits have in common but the dignity conferred upon them by the photographers who took their picture? These artists’ approaches also share crossreferences, as well as photographic and pictorial skills displayed in chiaroscuros, framings, poses, textures and drapings […]