[Winter 2022]

Les tableaux réunis
Musée d’art de Joliette
19.06.2021— 6.09.2021

By Yannick Marcoux

[Excerpt]
In a poem in his L’art poétique, Nicolas Boileau made a suggestion that has become famous: “Put your work twenty times on the anvil.” It seems that twenty times is not enough for the artist Martin Désilets, who, since 2017, has undertaken to photograph, and then superimpose digitally, all the modern and contemporary works in the museums that he visits. This voracious picture taking is for his project Matière noire, in which each group of a hundred superimposed works constitutes a “state.”

The exhibition Les tableaux réunis at the Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ) featured three series of Désilets’s works. The first was Matière noire. The second was his most recent project, conceived during a residency at the MAJ, for which he used the same approach, taking as his subject the works in the museum’s permanent collection…
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: Martin Désilets — Yannick Marcoux ]