A staging, a constructed story, a represented story. The purpose ofAn almost tangible fictionimagined by curators Roxanne Arsenault and Joséphine Rivard, finally comes to life. “By playing with paradoxes, it’s about saying that fiction is not so far from reality after all,” explains the latter. On the walls and floors of Patel Brown, the canvases and sculptures, the colors and shapes translate the assumed presence of the artists’ personal mythologies and the subjectivity at the heart of interpersonal relationships.
“There is nothing more tangible in our conception of art than to refuse the most official, most obvious narratives, than to go into resistance,” she specifies. According to the gallery’s guest curator for the exhibition, the norms and the agreed-upon things simply do not reflect the identity of the art world.
In fact, the artists brought together in this group exhibition—Olga Abeleva, Malik McKoy, Mégane Voghell, Ayam Yaldo, Frances Adair Mckenzie and Muriel Ahmarani Jaouich—play with fiction, create stories, and represent situations and characters. “Olga, by the way, is strong in this, particularly in this idea of playing with paradoxes,” confides Joséphine Rivard.
Olga Abeleva thus enjoys treating her subjects through a theatrical, cinematic lens. “I consider painting as a two-dimensional plane, a snapshot, and I like to give it another function and another narration as one might do with a screen capture,” says the artist.
Her works indeed show us these archetypal characters, deliciously bizarre and burlesque. “I consider them to be autonomous and able to migrate from one canvas to another,” says Olga Abeleva. As for the way they adopt each other’s gestures or roles, one can only think of theatrical conventions. “What I particularly like about theatre is the suspension of disbelief, where the audience simply agrees to believe, for example, that a cardboard moon means it’s night,” she adds.
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“I guess it’s a way for me to deal with other semiotic consensuses that we see in other fields, outside of theater,” says Olga Abeleva, who thrives on hyperdramatic iterations of everyday events. The artist believes that her paintings resonate particularly with the exhibition’s title, An almost tangible fictionbecause all her characters and the situations in which they evolve are amalgams of various media that she consumes, “from very classical philosophy to really reality TV trash through Russian literature.” “Looking at Olga’s work more closely, you get the impression that you’ve already seen the film in question, but of course, it’s a story she invented,” the curator points out. A horror film? A romantic comedy? A children’s story? All of these at once, perhaps.
Joséphine Rivard also appreciates Olga Abeleva for highlighting marginalized characters rooted in a fiction that she describes as non-Hollywood. “In cinema, there is a very specific formula that Hollywood uses that gives me the impression that interpersonal interactions are simply modeled, whether we like it or not, and become omnipresent,” the artist emphasizes. And reproduced endlessly by the general public.
When the recipe is exported to non-Western audiences, however, Olga Abeleva believes that the result resembles “a parody of contraband.” She therefore makes a point of not being too prescriptive for the viewers in her paintings in order to give free rein to their own imagination. “A piece cannot exist without the audience activating it, like a catalyst, and the same goes for my paintings,” the artist emphasizes.
The multitude of bodies, humans, stories and worlds finally makesAn almost tangible fiction an exhibition that embodies an unofficial story that is just as important as the one we are constantly being told. “The body, in particular, is evocative because it becomes an avatar, a kind of transport of ideals, which has a direct link with fiction,” the curator continues.
With Roxanne Arsenault, Joséphine Rivard thought about a museum proposal and worked with artists to put together an exhibition that brings together various figurative practices with an emphasis on the maximalist aspect. “I don’t claim that we’re revolutionizing anything, but I think it’s a language that deserves to be seen,” the curator emphasizes. Seen, certainly, and discussed, too.