[Summer 2026]
Serge Clément et Alexis Desgagnés, Métamorphose
by Sylvain Campeau
Québec et Paris, VU et Éditions Loco, 2025, 336 pages
[EXCERPT]
Matière noire, a beautiful, understated book, with an embossed (with the title and the artist’s name) graphite-coloured hard cover, includes three essays written in French, along with their translations into English and German: “The Black Doorway is Always There, at the Edge. Reflections on the Work of Martin Désilets,” by Catherine Nichols; “Art from the Cave,” by Michel Poivert; and “Experiencing All States of the Mattter,” by Pauline Martin. Interspersed with these texts are perhaps (I haven’t counted) two hundred reproductions – in colour! – and biographies.
After a disconcerting, totally off-subject opening to her essay, Nichols gives a good description of the process that Désilets has developed, his “protocol” (which can be summarized as the accumulation and superimposition on a single surface of a large quantity of photographs of artworks from a series or a museum collection). She reports that Désilets has said he was “attempting to exhaust the act of photography, to create a work . . . that would be the sum of all works, or the last work.” Then, she situates Matière noire historically, with a discussion about his possible influences, her main references being Kazimir Malevich’s suprematist period (in particular Black Square), Ad Reinhardt’s Black Paintings, the Rothko Chapel in Houston, Laurence Sterne’s black page in Tristram Shandy, and Goya’s engravings Los desastres de la guerra; she also cites Susan Sontag, who commented on the Goya works in her essay Regarding the Pain of Others. A comparison with the “sculptures” that Anish Kapoor produced using Vantablack, a black coating that makes surfaces almost undetectable, could easily have been added to this list. It would have allowed Nichols to note that the Matière noire series is a deposit (of ink, rather than Kapoor’s paint) that, as we see, engulfs all light, even as it swallows up the works photographed.
[…]
[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Sylvain Campeau collabore à de nombreuses revues canadiennes et européennes. Auteur de sept recueils de poésie et de plusieurs essais sur les arts visuels, il publie en 2022 Écrans motiles, aux Presses de l’Université de Montréal. En tant que commissaire, il a également à son actif une quarantaine d’expositions.