Living in a Material World

Galerie Donald Browne presents Living in a Material World from September 6th to 28th, the final installation of three shows in collaboration with the Phi Centre in 2013.

Process and approach to material are significant in both Paul Bureau’s and Valérie Kolakis’ practices. Bringing these two corpuses together reveals additional conceptual depth in each of them and legitimates this curatorial association.

Kolakis questions the common use of raw materials like glass and metal through their decontextualization. Everyday objects casted in bronze, marble, and even cement are part of the process of diffraction of perceptiveness. The displacements within the architectural space create subtle shifts in point of view and defy the relation that we maintain with our environment.

Paul Bureau's paintings, resounding way beyond the surface, explore and embody a subjective field of emotions and physicality. These masses of paint present the materiality of their conception and invite the viewer to look beyond color joints and into the accumulation. Bureau explores canvas, paper, ceramic and cardboard as surfaces to built and drift with oil paint, his material of choice.

 

Born in Athens, Greece, Valérie Kolakis works and lives in Montréal. Her most recent exhibitions include the Québec Triennial: The Work Ahead of Us (Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, 2011),  They Go Round and Round (0047, Oslo, Norway, 2010) and Something is happening that is not happening (Program : initiative for art and architectural collaborations, Berlin, Germany, 2007). In 2011, she participated in a residency in Clisson (France) and one at L’Oeil de Poisson (Québec).

 

Paul Bureau lives and works in Montréal. For the past twenty-five years he has been pursuing an exploration that oscillates between automatism and geometric abstraction. He has exhibited in Canada and on the international scene, including two recent solos in Montreal THRUST (2012) and One on One (2010). The monograph The Secret Life of Painting: Paul Bureau’s Somatic Abstracts includes a text from James D. Campbell and was published in 2010.