Surface et intervalle
November 22 - December 20, 1997
The Galerie Trois Points will present a series of pictorial works by Mario Côté in which the artist continues to reflect on the relationship between image and painting.
Drawing on the history of the video that he sees as the story of the moving image, Mario Côté reinvests it through the medium of painting. His work always oscillates between two poles which he designates as the surface and the interval.
First, Côté‘s paintings show a plastic handling of the work. By this more formal approach, he questions the passage of the videographic history of the screen medium to the pictorial medium by trying to verify if it can help bring the image thus recovered to the idea of a surface.
Then, assuming that the artist’s work is interested in the idea of the passage of the cinema (for example, Vertov’s experimental cinema, which he refers to repeatedly) to video and video to painting, he tries to bring out the residual elements of these successive passages; obvious elements in the interval of these passages, in the comma which separates them, one would be tempted to think.
Mario Côté‘s reflection on the gaze refers to a global project in which he supposes that he (the gaze) can not only cloud the perception, but also act a little like a real screen (monitor) that allows the fragmented image to reconstitute itself.
The tables presented by Mario Côté are thus similar to these residual images of the passage between the mediums, images in front of which the observer is active since it allows the recovery.
It is also possible, in order to better understand the large project of the artist, to see other works from his production. Indeed, Mario Côté presents a work currently at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal. The launch of his last video tape entitled “4 songs for the eye” will take place, moreover, on December 10 at the Goethe Institut, and this, from 8 pm.
Mario Côté, or when formalism and abstraction are multi-referential. From November 22, at Galerie Trois Points.