PASCAL GRANDMAISON LA VIE ABSTRAITE : LE TEMPS TRANSFORMÉ DIAZ CONTEMPORARY , TORONTO

15 OCTOBRE - 21 NOVEMBRE

PASCAL GRANDMAISON

LA VIE ABSTRAITE : LE TEMPS TRANSFORMÉ

DIAZ CONTEMPORARY , TORONTO
100 Niagara St, Toronto
(416) 361-2972
www.diazcontemporary.ca
OPENING 15 OCTOBER FROM 7 TO 9 PM

Diaz Contemporary is pleased to present new film work by Pascal Grandmaison, opening Thursday, October 15 from 7 to 9 pm. The main work in the exhibition – La vie abstraite – a 45-minute, two-channel video projection, contextualizes the transition from an objective vision of nature to pure abstraction, echoing the working methodologies of Kazimir Malevich, founder of the Suprematist movement, marking the ways in which his vision shifted from observation of the real to spiritual abstraction and back again to a figural interpretation. The Futurist opera, Victory Over the Sun, was a collaborative project where Malevich created the set design, including a special black square curtain -- the genesis of the black square monochrome, and the Suprematist movement. Victory Over the Sun is a rejection of the imitation of nature in favour of ''the supremacy of pure feeling,'' where the visual phenomena are in themselves meaningless. The theatre piece illustrated the idea of taking down the sun and locking it in a concrete box to create a new form of light, demonstrating technological superiority over the old world. After his brutal arrest in 1930, Malevich returned to a figurative approach to painting, imitating established styles. This transition in his work from figurative painting to abstraction and back again was provoked by the political power of the Soviet Union. Suprematism was a way to evacuate recognizable forms to pure abstraction, in part to avoid usefulness in the Communist propaganda that sanctioned socialist realism.

Video documentation:

The dissolution film series presents paired images across a bisected square, showing dissolution or the transformation of material from one state to another. In dissolution #1, we see a watery form in the air: moving, disappearing, reforming. Similar to the rain and cloud in La vie abstraite, air and water transform the scene to an abstract world. In dissolution #2, a pebbled landscape is interrupted by the appearance of bricks, placed by a mysterious hand, that settle and after a moment are ejected from the scene. The view is relieved of its impediment, but the bricks return again and again to block that view, suggestive of the constant struggle between obstruction and liberation.