L'éloge de la perte (In Praise of Loss)
The dichotomy implied by the title of Lucie Duval’s exhibition sets the tone for an equally paradoxical sensory experience. Taxonomy of a private and playful universe, L’éloge de la perte renders a poetic exploration in ink where the artist fully surrenders herself to play that compels the whole body to plunge in. Never bogged down by formal research, Duval works with the essential consistency of the paper, passionately losing herself in a liberating examination of plasticity. At times nearly to the point of saturation, she journeys, through calligraphy or savage sculptural gestures where ribald ravines leave their mark on the surface, eloquent proof of a free spirit. On the edge of the known and the accepted, these pictorial ramblings trace the pleasure of distraction, guided solely by the certainty of being sure of nothing. Painting becomes the pretext for a blind and deliberate quest, a redemptive loss of self. A necessary return to the very act of creation, the hand embodying what might be a tendril rooted in the mind.
This "doing" alights then imposes itself on the media and, with it, a sensitivity that wraps its arms around you. The liquefied flesh of matter takes form in the work, filling the eye and washing the skin with its lustful energy. Exalted and radiant, the ink pierces the barrier between the body and the work, overwhelming our senses. Beneath the weight of this intangible relationship, emotion shatters.
L’éloge de la perte encourages a random and accidental reading of the works, a reading that creates antithetical performance narratives between the various pieces. As we stroll, these baroque stories without end weave a thread, tying and untying a narrative web born from each wanderer’s imagination. Improbable prepositions, the exhibition’s asemantic ABC, capriciously punctuate this fanciful universe and conspire to create a poetic reading of Duval’s work. Never literal, these writings give birth to a dialectic that plays with the suppleness of language, creating and recreating the artist’s own personal linguistic.
A true mosaic of signs, L’éloge de la perte invites us to constantly reread the image’s textual meaning. Underpinning the contextual relationships, the overlapping of words, ink and objects produce linguistic acts that undoubtedly alter our essential perception of the works. With just a glance, the to and fro, whether haphazard or intentional, break down the established order between the real and the imaginary, allowing a complex subtext to take root, a story to get lost in. At the heart of this dialog of the senses, the osmosis between the speakable and the inutterable, burgeoning esthetic and textual wanderings that speak loud and clear to anyone with an attentive ear.
- Anne-Marie Dubois
(English version available soon)
Lucie Duval est une artiste en arts visuels. Depuis de nombreuses années, son travail s’articule autour d’une interférence entre ce qui est lu et ce qui est vu, un parcours où les mots se jouent des objets et des images. Elle est née à Mont-Laurier, vit et travaille au Québec. Elle a étudié à l’École des beaux-arts de Toulouse et a obtenu, en 1983, le Diplôme national supérieur d’expression plastique (DNSEP), avec félicitations des membres du jury. Elle a exposé régulièrement en Amérique du Nord, en Europe et en Asie. Ses œuvres font entre autre partie de la collection permanente Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, du musée des Beaux-Arts de Sherbrooke, des prêts d’œuvres d’art du Conseil des Arts du Canada et du Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec et de collections privées. Elle a réalisé plusieurs projets d’art public et a publié en 2010 le livre Histoires à tirer par les oreilles. Elle est représentée par la galerie Isabelle Gounod à Paris.
Anne-Marie Dubois est titulaire d’une maîtrise en histoire de l’art à l’Université du Québec à Montréal avec concentration en études féministes (2014). Ses recherches portent principalement sur les représentations queers au sein des pratiques actuelles et de la manière dont elles revisitent puis dénaturalisent les concepts d’identité, de genre, de race et de sexualité.