Luc Paradis
Simultaneous Displays
November 20–December 20, 2014
Opening: November 19, 6–9pm
Parisian Laundry
3550 St-Antoine West
Montreal (Quebec)
Canada, H4C 1A9
www.parisianlaundry.com
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Comprised of a collection of paintings, sculptures and works on paper, Simultaneous Displays by Luc Paradis playfully addresses the process of staging, as well as the viewer’s experience in relation to what is displayed. A selection of the artworks presented were in fact conceived of and produced in Paris, during the artist’s residency at Les Recollets. Paradis’s practice often references the historical avant-garde, tempering its rhetoric with today’s popular culture. With this in mind, Simultaneous Displays can be understood as a response to the stage sets of Bauhaus, negotiating the problems surrounding the stage as a three-dimensional space. Additionally, the artist draws from musical composition in the rhythmic arrangement of his paintings.
A space designated for viewership, the stage in fact works according to a negative logic. Although its underlying principle is to guarantee the visibility of positively articulated bodies such as actors and props, visibility can only be maintained through the stage’s own absence—through its imperceptibility as the distinction between these bodies and their interactions. Thus, in its negativity, the stage lays out a setting for dynamic encounters between objects. Nevertheless, when the position of the viewer is taken into account, the relationships on display are effectively ironed out, as the staging’s dynamism is relegated to a virtual field under the mechanism of the eye. Both the stage as a negative condition of display for active exchanges and the limits of this condition in the face of an instrumentalized vision are starting points for Paradis’s Simultaneous Displays.
The exhibition is structured around opposing ensembles or stages. Within this scenario of repetitive doubling, various items simultaneously come together and stand apart in a sort of tentative encounter. Similarities are heightened through the fundamental staging of difference, as each artwork comes face to face with its uncanny evil twin. Moreover, painterly space is activated through the treatment of sculpture as a two-dimensional entity, turning it into a complex and shifting surface and indicating the mobilization of the eye. The negative principle of visibility is therefore extended between stages, producing a dialogue between binary poles that immerses the viewer in a liminal space. As such, in Simultaneous Displays the binary definition of elements is less so undone than reiterated to the point of hyperbole.
Coming up this winter:
October 21–December 20, 2014
BNL MTL
L’avenir (looking forward) featuring L.A.-based artist Edgar Arceneaux
November 29–December 8, 2014
UNTITLED. Miami Beach
Featuring: Jaime Angelopoulos, BGL, Valérie Blass, Celia Perrin Sidarous and Janet Werner
January 14–February 14, 2015
Janet Werner