Mathieu Latulippe: The Cellule
Amélie Fortin: 125 Hours
Galerie B-312
September 9 – October 8, 2016

Galerie B-312 starts the new season hosting two interesting exhibitions, The Cellule dedicated to Mathieu Latulippe and One Hundred Twenty Five Hours to Amélie Laurence Fortin. They are both multidisciplinary artists discussing in different ways issues of Time and Space in the contemporary world.

Mathieu Latulippe presents several works using different media to explore the links between the world of medicine and the environment, especially the concept of health care in rapport to the architecture, landscape and nature.
Mathieu choose the Sanatorium, a medical facility for tuberculosis located in the mountains, as metaphor to investigate important themes such as Rationality vs Irrationality and Nature vs Science.
Photo archives, paintings and medical tools displayed at the exhibition refer to it and to the myth of an invincible science. But what are some of the limitations of science? How far will technology go? Could humanity live completely self-sustained in a technological world?

In a transparent technological cell in the middle of the room, a sculpture of a child looks at us through swimming goggles. We are not able to see his eyes. We are not sure he’s breathing air.
Despite his aseptic and clinical environment, a painting of a mountain stands out, as nostalgia for something he’s never experienced. In the cell, normal laws of reality no longer fully apply and laws of nature are supposedly suspended.

As in the science fiction art film Stalker (A.Tarkovsky, 1979) in which the Stalker works in some unclear area in an indefinite future through the “Zone”, Mathieu Latulippe’s work demands us rethink the relationship between desires of invincibility and reality, the vagaries of human intentions and the need for mystery. He invites us to rethink our thoughts about technology and its dangerous consequences.
As Stalker said in the film: “[…] the zone is exactly how we created it ourselves, like the state of our spirits… but what is happening, that does not depend on the zone, that depends on us.”

Amélie Laurence Fortin presents a minimal black sculpture hanging from the ceiling. From a tiny hole a non-stop trickle of small glass marbles flows into a geometric cavity on the floor. Like a large hourglass, the mysterious sculpture becomes a device used to measure the passage of time. In this case, 125 hours, as the title suggests. In fact the sand’s quantity is regulated to the exhibition’s period. Once the 125th day is reached, the sand will cover the whole cavity.

It’s a mobile sculpture, changeable with the time. The viewer is able to see the entire process and get lost in idea of time: thoughts of the past, days, years, or the future are all conceptual ideas, paradigms, which exist only in our mind. In Amélie’s work, Time, an abstract concept, becomes a real physical entity.

The dramatic light, the minimal shapes, the black and white colors and the silence remind us of a solemn event commonly perceived by all cultures and viewers.
Amélie’s work explores the time to be experienced with the mind. Analyzing time, the viewer will also need to be aware of their perceptions as well. What are the eyes that sense the light of day and darkness of night? Without an understanding of consciousness that is perceiving time, how will we know if our understanding is distorted or not? How do we fit this variable of changing perspective of the viewer as we seek to understand truth?

Another incredible movie comes to mind.
As in 2001: A Space Odyssey film (Kubrick, 1968) the iconic monolith has been subject to countless interpretations, Amélie’s work suggest multiple thoughts.
It is up to us to find our own.

Eleonora Milner