Artist Statement
"Progress in my art is only possible insofar as I stretch out toward the impossible. I can't find any other words to explain it. Obviously, without fail, as soon as I stop working on an image or a series of images, while moments before I felt that I had dissolved the surface of the visible and laid something bare, right away the illusion dissipates, everything freezes and becomes ridiculous and shameful. New veils fall into place, reality tenses up and sticks out its tongue once again. And that’s the situation that enrages me and pushes me to start anew. Of course, deep down I know that I will never attain anything like a moment of resolution—that impossible encounter with the naked visage of the Real. It is our condition to live in a world from which something is missing. But I continue, and this movement, this reaching out toward the impossible, is what I call love. Ultimately, love is what drives me to continue to create images."
Excerpt from "Fragmented Worlds, Mystery of Love", a text by Matthieu Brouillard included in "Darkness Implacable" (2012)
Matthieu Brouillard was born in Montreal. He studied visual and media arts at UQÀM (Montreal). His work—in photography, drawing, and video—has been exhibited, screened and published in Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Switzerland, and the Unites States. The artist has collaborated with theatre directors and worked on a project that combined video, literature and architecture ("Les Archi-fictions", 2006). In the fall of 2010 he was lecturer in the Art History department at the University of Zürich, in Switzerland, conducting a seminar that he entitled "Photography and the Crisis of the Subject in 20th-Century French Thought". In 2012 he was an invited researcher in a research group in aesthetics at the University of Arts and Design in Karlsruhe (Germany). A two-person exhibition of complementary works by Brouillard and Canadian visual artist Donigan Cumming (1947-) was launched at FOFA Gallery (Montreal) in March 2012. His images are held in private and public collections in Canada, Germany and Switzerland. His work has received support many times from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres du Québec, and the FQRSC (Fonds Québécois de Recherche sur la Société et la Culture). Matthieu Brouillard is currently working on a film and new photo series as part of a research project done in collaboration with the Haute École d'Art et de Design in Geneva.
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