[Winter 2022]

Galerie Laroche/Joncas, Montréal
8.09.2021 — 9.10.2021

By Mona Hakim

[Excerpt]
Presented in a single exhibition space and arranged facing each other, the photographs of Sylvie Readman and Denis Rioux highlight their common concern with the issues and properties of the photographic language within which the primary conditions of the visual and conceptual experience operate. This pairing of two established artists proves effective to the extent that their points of convergence and divergence correspond from one sensitive surface to the other, from one wall to the other, at Galerie Laroche/Joncas.

Readman offers a body of black-and-white works that are solidly aligned with the consistently intense, rigorous technical work for which she has been known since the 1980s. Her manipulations of light, matter, and space – by technical strategies that include overexposure, foreshortening, or blurring, panning, or granular effects – have given rise to a production that reveals her fine skill at exploring the far reaches of picture taking and perception. She probes these spaces through various temporal frames, whether mnemonic trace, imaginary time of the image, evanescence of materials, the boundaries of our relationship with nature, or the precariousness of the human condition…
Translated by Käthe Roth.

  
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 119 – AGAINST NATURE ]
[ Complete article and more images, in digital version, available here: Sylvie Readman, Denis Rioux — Mona Hakim ]