[Fall 2025]
Fluctuation du semblable
by Jean-Michel Quirion
Occurrence, espace d’art et d’essai contemporains, Montréal
18.01.2025 — 15.03.2025
[EXCERPT]
In Fluctuation du semblable, a body of work presented in a solo exhibition at Occurrence, we were abruptly immersed by the Montreal artist Sébastien Cliche into the elsewhere of a speculative dehumanized society. The gallery, usually devoted to the presentation of contemporary art, was transformed. We were momentarily transported into a perhaps not-so-distant future as we strolled through the simulation of a deserted high-rise office, once bustling with staff seeing to too-concrete, immediate, repetitive, methodical, and – above all – disembodied responsibilities.
In Cliche’s imaginary what’s to come, the grey cubicles – symbols of administrative monotony – are now abandoned by those who would have had to work there. Humans have been completely replaced by machines. All that remains are the vestiges of an (over-)bureaucratized world, from furnishings to stationery to partitions. This setting is occupied by a plethora of pictures and sculptures that are practically indescribable. It seems impossible to find the right words to define the algorithmic prints and the artefacts shaped by diverse techniques or assembled by Cliche’s hands as his formal and material displacements and reversals proliferate. The installation was imposingly complex.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 130 – PLANTS AND GARDENS ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: Fluctuation du semblable]
Jean-Michel Quirion is a doctoral student in museology at the Université du Québec en Outaouais. He has been a cultural worker for ten years and is currently co-executive director, programming, at Centre CLARK in Montreal. He is a regular contributor to specialized magazines such as Ciel variable, ESPACE art actuel, Esse arts + opinions, and Vie des arts.