pièce contre pièce

pièce contre pièce

MAUDE BERNIER CHABOT

The exhibition project pièce contre pièce appears as a figure of the indeterminate. The works which compose it convey the omnipresence of a troubled existence (multiple) the quality of which is to leave us battling with the  fact of having no other possibility but indecision. Consequently, the stake is physically challenging: that of perceiving the complexity of a body autopsied in both its sensitive and material dimension.

For Maude Bernier Chabot, the sculptural object arises from a mutation exercise. Favouring the technique of moulding for its ability to metamorphose one material into another, she endows the form with a new assemblage that blurs its identities—of nature, of gender. Putting the body—as sensing and affected flesh—at the center of this research, this selection of works produced over a decade opens onto this complex organ that is the skin—supporting, covering, protective, subjective, open, libidinal.

The uncertainty and uneasiness before some of its figurations move from representation towards a more tenuous evocation, something more ambiguous that always questions the presence of the body in regards to what it faces. The forms' appearance is stripped of any resemblance in order to move the rational experience towards the feeling body, confronted with a new physicality whose contours remain difficult to discern.

Vénus endormie is in this image the tainted portrait of a complex genre imbued with the feminine and masculine, comprised of pleasure and pain. To this representation, Nids brings a vaster bestiality via the gesture of bowing like an offering of fetishes laid before an altar of desires. At its opposite end, the twisted body of Vestibule becomes the immaculate relic of an unhoped-for promise whose fragility will make existence impossible. Souffles is the first trace of this obligatory mark that annihilates any idea of purity, an extraction that is difficult to envisage and which nevertheless draws enough strength from the plasticity of its memory to carry out its passage.

At the edges of these examples that punctuate pièce contre pièce, one encounters a deep reflection on matter as the skin of a porous relation between the inside and outside. These objects exist like intermediaries that are able to give material form to the twists and coils of combined identities.

— Jonathan Demers