Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Contours , an exhibition by Maude Corriveau. Through a new series of pastels on paper, the artist explores the porosity of images by incorporating undulating oil-painted frames. These pictorial borders not only delineate the image, but blend into it, blurring the line between the depicted space and its real environment. Their supple lines evoke a state of instability, a dissolution of the traditional frame that, historically, serves to contain and structure the image.
Corriveau explores the frame in its sculptural and pictorial dimensions, playing on the tensions between flexibility and structure, movement and fixity, depth and surface. Each frame, unique in its rounded shape, overflows onto the image and absorbs it, thus extending the hues and optical effects. His work features blinds, veils, and glass surfaces that fold and unfold to the rhythm of light and color variations, amplifying this impression of oscillation between interior and exterior. In some drawings, the artist photographs the glass of the frame before representing it, creating a fascinating mise en abyme. The curtain motif echoes the simulacrum in art history while evoking the digital filters that alter our perception of reality. This play of reflections and successive reproductions questions the very nature of the contemporary image and its materiality.
Inspired by virtual aesthetics, Corriveau creates works where transparency and light interact with the material. Dry pastel, due to the vibrant and unstable nature of its pigments, never permanently fixes itself to its support. Applied in thin, successive layers, it evokes the sensuality of powders and eyeshadows, adding a tactile dimension to its exploration. The ambiguity of her compositions lies in the interaction between the pigmented areas and the spaces left untouched, where the grain of the gray paper actively contributes to the visual dynamics. Thus, the drawing constantly diffracts, spreads, and redefines itself, causing the gaze to oscillate between depth and flatness, between image and object, offering the viewer images in perpetual metamorphosis.
This process is part of a broader reflection on the entropy of the visual and cultural systems of our time. In a world saturated with screens and interfaces that redefine our relationship to reality, this exhibition of drawings with fluid contours offers a contemplative experience. The image becomes a threshold between the tangible and the evanescent, a moving surface that destabilizes perceptions and questions the very nature of the visible. The artist wishes to thank the CALQ and the CAC for their generous support in the realization of this project.
