Review: Caroline Mauxion's Le murmure d'une empreinte at Arprim | Maclean's Parallaxe at Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert

There is a curious affinity between two shows on at the Belgo.

Both exhibitions involve games of distances, projections of bodies, whether they are human, celestial, or the guts of houses.

Le murmure d'une empreinte by Caroline Mauxion (with Céline Huyghebaert and Elise Anne LaPlante) at Arprim attempts to capture the subtle and ephemeral traces of the body in space, heightening its suggestiveness to a poetic density through abstracting it into fragmented and de-familarized aspects of flesh and simplified sculpture renderings.

On the whole, it has a soft, almost stained quality with a sustained moderate buzz of an atmosphere.

Spaced over the two rooms of Galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert, meanwhile, the works in Maclean’s Parallaxe use a variety of materials to suggest cosmic maps. This playful representationalism is particularly present in the main gallery, but it’s far less successful than what appears on the other side.

Here, in chunks of drywall and plasterboard seemingly removed from the walls of some building, there is a kind of mock archeology of the interior of buildings, siting them and renovating them into works about the working of walls. 

Easily legible as taking part in the language of abstract painting and collage (and often veering thoroughly into this), they are the most convincing when the most seemingly haphazard. At their best, it’s this charm of discovery that’s keen. 

 

Otherwise, they are graphically low-key blocks and textures set up in more familiarly painterly ways that sit comfortably and decoratively with these pieces that have the quality of cut-outs.

At Arprim there isn’t much of the same sense of architectural viscera and less sense of playfulness. Things are tidied up to the point that the tidiness gets a little unnerving. This sensuousness doesn’t really come from the trace of human bodies. Concrete might have done the trick, although silk wouldn’t have; it would have been too flat.

As an image, the porousness of skin is flattened and it is the smoothing out that counts. It’s the colouring that gives them their softness.

The works possess a muffled tactility, thus the appropriateness of the title, and the misfortune of attempting to drown out its soft rumble with a medley of voices through supplemental aspects.

These considerations aside, the works more persuasively have a medical lab aesthetic (or that of a body horror shampoo commercial). This encompasses the extreme close-ups of flesh and the various sculptural appendages which have the qualities of dental hardware constructions, or the various extraneous materials used in casting. They are a kind of materialized in-between space. This may be so much why they feel like art for hallways.

*We saw something comparable with Charley Young’s The Space Between Hands a few months ago at Circa where bits were cast and given what (accidentally) resembled quasi-scatalogical forms to be suspended from the wall.