[Fall 2026]

Transcender le banal
By Louis Perreault

[EXCERPT]

In his lovely book The Poetics of Space, the philosopher Gaston Bachelard wrote that “the exterior spectacle helps intimate grandeur unfold.” When Chieko Shiraishi crossed Quebec from Montreal to Escuminac, in the Gaspé Peninsula, she had the sense that she had shrunk, become tiny. The 850 kilometres that she travelled, the wide highways, the starry sky, and the colony of birds resting on the spine of Bonaventure Island were all signs that seemed to unfold something within her beyond simple observation, opening an interior space where she saw herself as smaller. Bachelard, again: “The immensity of the intimate domain is intensity.” During her visit to the Gaspé, Shiraishi thus undertook to write about and photograph not only what appeared before her eyes but also the clues to intensity in the intimate and the lived. The result is a kind of diary in which texts and images respond to each other like two sides of a single thing, as if manifestations of reality and their integration with experience exist only in an inseparable dialectic relationship.

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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 133 – INTIMACIES ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here : Transcender le banal ]

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For Louis Perreault, photography, writing, teaching and publishing all offer paths for probing the all-encompassing phenomenon of creation. He approaches each project with the same desire to learn – that of an eternal student. Although he occasionally exhibits his work, it is usually found in books and magazines.