Programming

Belgian artist Stéphane Gilot, newly installed in Montreal, presents an installation at DARE-DARE that brings together elements of painting and architecture.

C'est en suivant la frontière, en longeant la surface...*
The large curved wall covered with clay that absorbs most of the available space represents the fragment of a virtual tower that would cross the gallery. Between this "intruder" wall and the gallery wall, the space shrinks for the viewer and forces him to walk along the surface, to experience the sensation of limits to which the project is attached. We find ourselves on a blurred line opposing and linking depth and surface, volume and plane, tactile and visual, void and full, continuity and rupture. By introducing in the gallery this construction with the rough texture, the artist proposes a space of "worried" representation, in a very "Carrollian" discursive spirit where the monochrome surface of the wall plays of analogy with the ring of Moebius: by skirting its surface, the outside is found in continuity with the inside... At the bend in the curve, where space takes over and allows the body and the gaze to be turned around, the viewer encounters an image executed with a stencil, giving the symbolic figure of a truncated tower surrounded by an ellipse. Between the cut tower and the truncated tower, between the monochrome panel and the linear line, all fictions are allowed and all inversions too.

* Gilles Deleuze

Stéphane Gilot (Montreal) is a Belgian artist who completed his studies at the Institut Supérieur des Beaux-Arts Saint-Luc in Liège as well as a Master Class with Auke de Vries in the European Art Schools in Maastricht, The Netherlands. Since 1987, he has exhibited in Ferrières, Liège (Espace Flux, 1995), Maastricht (Netherlands), Brussels, Oostende, Roubaix (France), Grivegnée. In 1996, he participated in an itinerant event through a series of European cities (Manifestation "Mouvement-inertie", a project initiated by the center Les Brasseurs in Liège for which Gilot was also assistant coordinator) as well as in the Symposium de la nouvelle peinture in Baie-Saint-Paul.