Recent issues

Angela Grauerholz, Sirens, Heroines, and Unique Women – Ioana Dragomir et Cheryl Simon

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.

Michel Huneault, From Trauma to Peaceful Memory – Sophie Mangado

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.

le commun des mortels, “Look, you shall see” – Érika Nimis

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.”

Camera and the City – Stéphanie Yvette Hornstein

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.

Sepideh Farsi, Put Your Soul on Your Hands and Walk – Claudia Polledri

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.

Araki Nobuyoshi, Polaraki – Jessica Ragazzini

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.

Storage Story – Safia Belmenouar

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.”

Jasmin Bilodeau, C’est trop beau, je vais le prendre en photo – Nathalie Côté

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.

Geneviève Thibault, Intérieurs – Bernard Schütze

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.

Andrea Szilasi, Réfléchir – Alexis Desgagnés

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.

Yves Arcand, Indicia – Michel Hardy-Vallée

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.

James Andrew Rosen, Aphasia – Louis Perreault

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.”

Martin Désilets, Matière noire – Jean Pelchat

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.

Serge Clément et Alexis Desgagnés, Métamorphose – Sylvain Campeau

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.”

Marie J. Jean, 1985. Image-Worlds – An interview by Jérome Delgado

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.”

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