Buveurs de quintessences

Artists: Fortner Anderson, Steve Bates, Marie-Claire Blais, Olivia Boudreau, Claude Closky, Marie Cool Fabio Balducci, Alexandre David, Adriana Disman, Kitty Kraus, Stéphane La Rue, Kelly Mark, János Sugár

Curator: Caroline Andrieux, Darling Foundry, Montreal

The exhibition title, Buveurs de quintessences (Drinkers of Quintessences), is taken from Charles Baudelaire’s poem “Loss of a Halo” in which the author relates the experience of an artist who inadvertently lost his distinctive attribute but ends up accommodating this loss quite well. He is freed from the pressure surrounding his status as a creator and can mix anonymously with the crowd.

Hence, the artist’s personality and expertise are challenged and the fundamental principles of art are shaken. With Marcel Duchamp and Kasimir Malevitch as precursors, this artistic attitude based on the notion of void was built into a paradigm in the 1960s, when artists took position against the exaggerated expressivity then holding sway by seeking to subtract as much content as possible from their works and leave their subjectivity aside. At the same time they became fascinated by the infinite; through the notion of the void, they merged in their practices a critical point of view and a search for the absolute.

Buveurs de quintessences was first shown at the Darling Foundry in Montreal (Quebec) in 2018. The exhibition brings together Canadian and European artists whose work is driven by such a search for aesthetic experience. Presenting minimal works of art, apparently empty of content, ephemeral and furtive, that question their own status and embody a quest for the infinite, the exhibition takes position against the “society of the spectacle.” A hymn to meditation, Buveurs de quintessences brings together works in search of transcendence made by artists whose main concern is to emphasize the viewers’ direct experience of the work, bringing them to reflect on the very essence of art but also inviting them to let themselves be carried away by an experience beyond the gaze.

Performance programme within the framework of the exhibition:

Fortner Anderson, Points of Departure (January 31, 2019, 10:50am–11pm)
Steve Bates, Before, After, During (February 14, 2019, 7pm)
Kelly Mark, Everything and Nothing (February 28, 2019, 7pm)
Adriana Disman, Thresholding (March 3, 2019, 6:30pm–9:30pm)
Olivia Boudreau, Corps aveugles, corps voyants (April 4, 2019, 7pm–11pm)

A catalogue, edited by Darling Foundry in collaboration with Casino Luxembourg, is published on the occasion of the exhibition with essays by Fortner Anderson, Caroline Andrieux and Thierry Davila (254 x 203 mm, 112 p.). To order, please contact bookshop [​at​] casino-luxembourg.lu.

The exhibition is realised in collaboration with: Darling Foundry, Montreal.
With the support of: Conseil des arts du Canada, Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, Conseil des arts de Montréal, Délégation générale du Québec à Bruxelles, Ambassade du Canada, Botschaft der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Luxemburg and Institut Français du Luxembourg.