À fleur de sol - EN — Samuel Graveline

samuel
graveline

À fleur de sol

Fais-moi l’art
900 Cherrier St., Montreal
Canada

June 08 - June 22, 2024

Exhibition text and curator :
Penélope Desjardins

2021-2023

The exhibition À fleur de sol is composed of clay, plants, rocks, shores and disappearances. Organic materials, photographs, erased words and translucent papers are superimposed. Faced with impermanence, the artist gathers states, piles up tones and extracts textures from the few places that inhabit and write him. Echoing their vibrancy as well as their dissolution, the materials and ideas are polymorphic, lending the work a liquid poetry and impromptu collages. The river, the forest, the garden, the stream as well as the shore pile up and decline. Raw materials sublimate fleeting images and disappeared fragments. Replacing representations, the imprint of a place shapes an image; clay collected on the shore dyes cotton; the reverse of a photo suggests stories.

In a line of material explorations around photography as a concept rather than as an end, the artist offers a body of works that are soluble at the limits of the image. Through an approach that is both conceptual and poetic, the proposal draws on composite materials and approaches in order to give body and volume to the images, while multiplying the pictorial possibilities. Using botanical elements gleaned during field explorations, recovered photographs, mylar and textile, the artist's proposal probes the photographic condition and the mutation of images. Surfaces, sensitive to the traces of time, emerge from permeable compositions: porosity, transparency and resistance intertwine.

By encapsulating the materiality of the images and translating the imagery of the soils, À fleur de sol reveals itself as a bouquet of omens and vestiges.