2023 NOISES WENT SILENT
NOISES WENT SILENT
Blouin-Division Toronto
17 February - 8 April
Consisting of two new series of Blais’s sturdy yet graceful paintings on burlap, Noises went silent and Shadows swept away, this exhibition seeks to represent the ineffable powers of nature through moments of turbulence. Closely studying the conceptual force of “the fold” as a site of endless movement, space, and time, Blais presents us with the transitory patterns of the immeasurable sky, under which all of humanity’s myths and desires are gathered in the quest for knowledge of ourselves throughout time.
Using a colour palette decidedly reminiscent of twilight and dawn, Blais visualizes air currents in perpetual flux, as the instants when stillness turns to uncertainty. The same pinks, yellows and blues make up Giovanni Antonio Fasolo’s cloud fresco on the ceiling of Teatro Olimpica in Vicenza, Italy. With Blais’s interest in the freeform of the cloud as the intermediate construction permitting us to connect the physical with the metaphysical, her new works stir up the invisible, changeable forces of nature that interrupt Fasolo’s pristine sky of eternal quietude.
As Gilles Deleuze writes in his explanation of the fold, it is inseparable from wind. From this starting point, Blais expresses how the world around us can be interpreted as a continuous twisting and weaving through time and space, wherein all things unfold and refold without end. +
