Drinkers of Quintessences

The exhibition title, Buveurs de quintessences (Drinkers of Quintessences), is taken from Charles Baudelaire's poem "Loss of a Halo" in which the author relates the experience of an artist who inadvertently lost his distinctive attribute but ends up accommodating this loss quite well. He is freed from the pressure surrounding his status as a creator and can mix anonymously with the crowd.
Hence, the artist's personality and expertise are challenged and the fundamental principles of art are shaken. With Marcel Duchamp and Kasimir Malevitch as precursors, this artistic attitude based on the notion of void was built into a paradigm in the 1960s, when artists took position against the exaggerated expressivity then holding sway by seeking to subtract as much content as possible from their works and leave their subjectivity aside. At the same time they became fascinated by the infinite; through the notion of the void, they merged in their practices a critical point of view and a search for the absolute.
Buveurs de quintessences brings together Canadian and European artists whose work is driven by such a search for aesthetic experience. Presenting minimal works of art, apparently empty of content, ephemeral and furtive, that question their own status and embody a quest for the infinite, the exhibition takes position against the "society of the spectacle." A hymn to meditation, Buveurs de quintessences brings together works in search of transcendence made by artists whose main concern is to emphasize the viewers' direct experience of the work, bringing them to reflect on the very essence of art but also inviting them to let themselves be carried away by an experience beyond the gaze.