[Summer 2026]
Intérieurs
by Bernard Schütze
Maison du notaire, Trois-Pistoles
15.08.2025 — 20.10.2025
[EXCERPT]
Calls for democratization have led to a variety of strategies aimed at broadening access to art and drawing bigger audiences to cultural institutions. Yet, an essential factor is often neglected: how individuals define art and relate it to their own lives. Rather than seeing democratization as simply an expansion of access, might it not be more fertile to flip it around and invite people to participate actively in defining art on the basis of their own experience?
Such an inversion of the gaze was the basis for the exhibition Intérieurs, presented at La Maison du notaire, in Trois-Pistoles, in fall 2025. By asking residents of the Des Basques regional county municipality to propose objects that they felt had artistic value, the exhibition’s curator, Yves Amyot, shifted the aesthetic question toward lived experience and the everyday. Some sixty heterogeneous pieces, submitted by men and women with various backgrounds and life circumstances, were displayed. Each “art” object collected from a home was accompanied by a short narrative about its significance. No limitation was put on origins or media. Faithful to the spirit of democracy, Amyot accepted almost all the submissions, a third of which were then chosen for a photographic intervention by guest artist Geneviève Thibault.
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[ Complete issue, in print and digital version, available here: Ciel variable 132 – TABLEAUX ]
[ Complete article in digital version available here: TITRE ARTICLE]
Bernard Schütze is an independent art critic and curator whose essays have been published in numerous art magazines. As well as having written various catalogue articles and artist monographs, he has presented talks at several art-oriented events mainly in Canada and Europe. He lives and works in Montreal.