Filigranes en mille temps
January 14 - March 4, 2017
Galerie Trois Points is thrilled to present Filigranes en mille temps, the fruit of a somewhat improbable encounter which resulted in an unusual group exhibition featuring works from gallery artists alongside European Old Masters.
Two women, different generations, different paths: one passionate about the past as the other is strongly anchored in the present. Both share a similar passion for art. Director of Galerie Trois Points Émilie Grandmont-Bérubé meets the keen eye of Jan Johnson, an expert and highly reputed dealer in Modern and Old Masters prints for nearly forty years who is now located in Chambly (QC) when not travelling around the world to find new works and meet clients. Over the course of their discussions there have emerged common sensitivities, reflections and questions transcending eras. They started elaborating an audacious project: to produce a group exhibition featuring works by gallery artists alongside Modern and Old Master prints created between the 15th and 20th centuries.
Art is a dialogue. Sometimes a quite intimate one, captured between our gaze and the artwork, at other times it is a dialogue between the works or between artists. Contemporary art sometimes gives us that great privilege of actually exchanging with artists, allowing us to compare interpretations or understandings of what we are experiencing.
Regardless of the century in which he lives, the artist – like every human being – is pulled by the same search for meaning in the face of love, loss, emptiness, loneliness, acute awareness of time passing by and lost forever. It is within that essential human quest that the works gathered here find a common place, commenting upon their social context and its transformations, by their record defying obscurity and celebrating lasting values.
When facing art created centuries before, our gaze changes: we must project ourselves into another space and time, when hours flowed much more slowly, when encounters lasted longer and when the very idea of seeing our whole lives dictated by tiny little electronic devices would have been pure science fiction… Filigranes en mille temps offers to works from the past an opportunity to interact freely with works of today. The reverie in the child’s eyes’ in the Besnard print echoes a desire to create and measure space with Clint Griffin, while the written characters on Olga Chagaoutdinova’s grandmother’s deathbed brings a new light to Piranesi’s ossuary.
Painting, video, photography and prints intermingle in a particularly current artistic quest. The works of Olga Chagaoutdinova, Clint Griffin, Milutin Gubash, Anne-Renée Hotte and Olivia McGilchrist come together beautifully with those of Albert Besnard (1849-1934), William Blake (1757-1827), Cornelis Cort (c.1533-1578), Max Klinger (1857-1920), Carl Wilhelm Kolbe (1759-1835), Wilhelm Laage (1868-1930), Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778), Marco Ricci (1676-1729) and John Raphael Smith (1752-1812). Their works unfurl, creating new narrative arcs as they offer a new and continuously moving reading.