Les travaux des artistes dont nous présentons ici des portfolios sont appréhendés sous l’angle du tableau, photographique, il va sans dire, mais qui puise à des traditions autant photographiques que picturales et même cinématographiques. Scènes de la vie quotidienne, scènes de conflits et portraits en pose ou inopinés comportent tous une dimension sociétale, avec un ancrage référentiel souvent palpable, mais qui ne se veut cependant pas tant spécifique qu’archétypal et emblématique de l’époque contemporaine.
[Summer 2026]
Issue 132 of Ciel variable, titled Tableaux, brings together works by Donigan Cumming, Jeff Wall, and Luc Delahaye, exploring contemporary social issues through the photographic tableau. The issue also features essays, an interview with Marie J. Jean, and a selection of exhibitions and publications in contemporary photography from Quebec and internationally.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Editorial
Authors: Jacques Doyon
Buy this issue → [Summer 2026] Editorial by Jacques Doyon The artists’ portfolios that we present in this issue are apprehended from the point of view of the tableau – photographic, of course, but also drawing on pictorial and even cinematographic traditions. They include views of daily life, scenes of conflicts, and portraits, posed […]
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Jacques Doyon | Artists: Donigan Cumming, Jeff Wall, Luc Delahaye
Buy this issue → [Summer 2026] Thematic presentation by Jacques Doyon The artists’ portfolios that we present in this issue are apprehended from the point of view of the tableau – photographic, of course, but also drawing on pictorial and even cinematographic traditions. In views of daily life, scenes of conflicts, and portraits, posed […]
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Mona Hakim | Artists: Donigan Cumming
Within the confined space of a parking attendant’s booth, where doors and windows act as a frame, Donigan Cumming captured the gestures and expressions of passersby on the fly, producing full-length portraits or landscape-format images. Left as negatives for forty-five years, these images eventually appeared in an unusually sized book. While the atypical nature of this limited edition publication makes it a collector’s item, Mona Hakim considers its refinement to lie in its subject, an endangered one: physical exchanges and portraits of individuals drawn directly from public space.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Kenneth Hayes | Artists: Jeff Wall
The retrospective that the MOCA in Toronto devoted to Jeff Wall brought together both his early backlit lightbox works, large-scale tableau photographs, and more stripped-down black-and-white compositions. Like classic rock, Wall’s images are now more than ever treated as historical tableaux, according to Kenneth Hayes.While, in his view, “a scrim of time and familiarity blurs and softens their perception,” the exhibition clearly highlighted the Vancouver artist’s command of composition, framing, montage, and scale.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Portfolios
Authors: Stephen Horne | Artists: Luc Delahaye
After a career as a photojournalist and war correspondent that earned him the highest honours, Luc Delahaye made the radical decision to leave that profession and produce images solely as an artist. The some seventy-four works he has created since 2001 nonetheless address the same subjects: scenes of devastation and war, their impact on civilian populations, portraits of victims, and political or institutional gatherings. Yet, according to Stephen Horne, the shift in Delahaye’s practice marks a move toward emotion.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Cheryl Simon, Ioana Dragomir | Artists: Angela Grauerholz
Written jointly by two authors, this essay was inspired by Angela Grauerholz’s photobook la femme 100 têtes, both by its form and by the sense of female collegiality it engenders. Although presented separately, the observations of Ioana Dragomir and Cheryl Simon ultimately form a cohesive whole, centred on the “surplus of meaning [that emerges] beyond the photograph.” In this work, whose title refers to Max Ernst’s historic book La Femme 100 Têtes, the emphasis is less on revealing identities than on concealing them.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Sophie Mangado | Artists: Michel Huneault
After twelve years of stays in Japan, photographer Michel Huneault has amassed an extensive body of documentation on the aftermath of the triple disaster that struck the Tohoku region in 2011 (earthquake, tsunami, and nuclear accident). From devastation to regeneration, his images bear witness to the “settled memory” taking shape there, as Sophie Mangado writes. In her essay, she examines the three bodies of work that make up POST TOHOKU 2012–2024 and observes how this transformation has also left its mark on Michel Huneault.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Essays
Authors: Erika Nimis | Artists: le commun des mortels
An unusual exhibition both for its content (damaged photographs) and for the sheer number of images, Dommage ! revealed the accumulative work of ordinary people (Jacques Barbier and Élise Pic). Drawn to collecting devalued, rejected, and even discarded images, the duo challenges “the notions of authorship, originality, and artistic value.” This is what Érika Nimis observed, describing the experience as akin to visiting “a cabinet of wonders.”
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein
Drawn from the collection of the National Gallery of Canada, the exhibition Camera and the City explored street photography. According to Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein, however, it did little to renew the way the subject is approached. Her review highlights a key concern—the narrative is “MoMA-centric,” in her view—but also underscores some of the exhibition’s strengths, particularly the conceptual photography section, featuring artists such as Susan Dobson, Melvin Charney, VALIE EXPORT, and others whose work exposes the shortcomings and contradictions of urban space.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Claudia Polledri | Artists: Sepideh Farsi
A haunting film about Gaza, Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk takes the form of a dialogue conducted through video communications between the filmmaker and a Palestinian photographer. The latter’s death, killed in a bombing, brings the narrative to an abrupt end. The documentary, a “cinematographic tribute to how photography bears witness” writes Claudia Polledri, sheds light on the realities of daily precarity. The technological disruptions, the critic notes, mirrors the protagonist’s living conditions.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Jessica Ragazzini | Artists: Araki Nobuyoshi
Prolific and provocative, Araki Nobuyoshi embraced the Polaroid for its simplicity and immediacy. It served, as Jessica Ragazzini puts it, as a means to “eternally fix the ephemeral,” a notion explored in her review of the Musée Guimet exhibition dedicated to the Japanese photographer. Linked to the donation of a collection of one thousand Polaroids, POLARAKI reflected both Araki’s penchant for excess and his experimental, almost casual approach to image-making, as he cuts, rearranges, and scribbles on his photographs. Ragazzini also notes the complexity of his practice, shaped by themes of eroticism and the traditional art of rope bondage.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Safia Belmenouar
The inaugural exhibition of South Korea’s first public museum dedicated to photography—the Photo SeMA—engaged in dialogue with the institution’s archives (comprising 20,000 works and documents), its surroundings, and a building designed in the shape of a camera shutter. Safia Belmenouar discusses the works of the six artists who approached the museum “a living space in which multiple experiences, narratives, and reinterpretations intersected.” The exhibition explored the very notion of collecting, presenting the Photo SeMA as “a place of fertile tensions rather than a museified space.”
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Nathalie Côté | Artists: Jasmin Bilodeau
A reflection on obsolescence and dematerialization, this exhibition contained only four photographs, yet each was monumental in scale and the result of an extensive process involving two stages of image capture and the use of maquettes. Depicting the seasons through four abandoned buildings, the series occupies a space between documentary and fiction, imbued with the trompe-l’œil sensibility that has long characterized BGL, the collective of which Jasmin Bilodeau was once a member. For Nathalie Côté, the artist thus reaffirms his affinity for a mode of working that is “physical, almost sculptural,” grounded in manipulation and hands-on making.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Bernard Schütze | Artists: Geneviève Thibault
Presented at the Maison du notaire in Trois-Pistoles, Intérieurs was grounded in the principle of democratizing art, though through what Bernard Schütze describes as an “inversion of the gaze”: local residents were invited to propose objects they considered to have artistic value. The exhibition, the critic observes, “shifted the aesthetic question toward lived experience and the everyday.” The approximately sixty objects on display were accompanied by photographs by Geneviève Thibault, whose photographic intervention in participants’ homes echoed the exhibition’s emphasis on abundance and the absence of hierarchy.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Alexis Desgagnés | Artists: Andrea Szilasi
The fifteen collages and six Polaroids by Andrea Szilasi brought together under the title Réfléchir prompted a response from Alexis Desgagnés marked by both sensitivity and restraint. “I realized that I had to speak not only about an exhibition but about this unique and paradoxical experience,” he writes. While he carefully describes the works, which emerge from a “manual, gestural, instinctive” process, he argues that the notions of space and the body provide the framework that “were key to reflecting” on the exhibition as a whole.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Exhibition reviews
Authors: Michel Hardy-Vallée | Artists: Yves Arcand
Originating from a process that begins with the accumulation of organic matter on acetate sheets, the large-format images in the exhibition Indicia evoked “a scientific imaginary” and suggested “the point of view of a microscope,” according to Michel Hard-Vallée. Through this nature-based practice, which aligns him with photographers such as Michael Flomen, Sara Angelucci, and Normand Rajotte, Yves Arcand probes the indexical dimension of the photographic sign while working at a remove from his subject. This “first assessment” of a decade of research, the critic argues, calls for a continuation.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Louis Perreault | Artists: James Andrew Rosen
During a convalescence that forced him into a long period of isolation, James Andrew Rosen re-evaluated his own photographic archives. He recontextualized them around the notion of repair and a “slow return to the outside world,” writes Louis Perreault, leading to the book Aphasia. Linked to the “transformative power of photography,” the body of work offers a meditation on impermanence. Enthralled, the critic praises Rosen for capturing the elusive, “this moment in suspension, which would be dissipated by a single movement.”
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Jean Pelchat | Artists: Martin Désilets
A beautiful and understated book, in Jean Pelchat’s view, Matière noire brings together Martin Désilets’ projects based on the accumulation and layering, on a single surface, of photographs of museum artworks. In his review, Pelchat focuses on this body of work by discussing the essays assembled for the publication, written by Catherine Nichols, Michel Poivert, and Pauline Martin. He notes both the strengths and weaknesses of their reflections, which variously evoke Ad Reinhardt, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and a “particular blur” surrounding well-known paintings.
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Readings
Authors: Sylvain Campeau | Artists: Alexis Desgagnés, Serge Clément
“Unique” despite a relatively familiar process—a double-sided book meant to be consulted from either end—Métamorphose brings together photographer Serge Clément and poet Alexis Desgagnés. Admiring their “osmosis,” Sylvain Campeau sees in their creative exchange a shared “density,” moving between a “concrete-and-glass jungle” and the figure of the bird within an “overcrowding of emotions.” The publication, he writes, is best appreciated when experienced “by travel through it following paths that veer off.”
Ciel variable 132 - TABLEAUX | Entrevues
Authors: Jérôme Delgado | Artists: Marie J. Jean
Far more than a catalogue for the eponymous exhibition, the book 1985. Image-Worlds offers an overview of a decade “through a plurality of points of view, both cultural and generational,” as Marie J. Jean explains. The director of the VOX centre also refers to this “editorial stance” of giving such weight to the image. “Slowing the gaze, contextualizing images and returning the weight of history to them, becomes a political act. In this sense, we aren’t content with documenting the past; we are concerned with current thought on the world of images in which we live.”