top of page
About
Mathieu Valade is originally from Salaberry-de-Valleyfield. His work has been presented at the MAC VAL (Paris), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and in several major centres, galleries and events in Canada, Brazil, the United States, France, Spain, Greece and Sweden. He has created public art works in various cities in Quebec. His creations are featured in several collections including those of the MNBAQ and the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul. He lives in Chicoutimi where he teaches sculpture and drawing as a professor at UQAC.
Artistic approach
My artistic practice explores the relationships of contradictions existing between simple forms and the images that they can evoke once diverted. The production of sculptural objects or drawings, always with a concern to put forward a strong plasticity, is hybridized with elements of simple representations (typography, logos, pictograms, geometric shapes) in order to raise new potentials of interpretation.
Considering the artistic object as an artifice, the sculptures and drawings that I propose require the exercise of making a certain "leap" into illusion: associating graphic or plastic elements in order to detect the image, opening a drawer, entering the sculpture, etc. The image is never completely given, it has to be constructed. It is proposed by the juxtaposition of different plastic events, shapes, breakthroughs, repetitions, light signals, like a decor whose elements take on meaning through an exercise in associating signs.
Many of my works revisit genres, modes of production or even works from moments in the history of art for which I have a particular interest. Thus, a sort of dialogue has been established in my practice with minimalism, conceptual art and artistic modernity in general. Without being the key to reading my works, this aspect of citation offers a second order of reading, as if they contained a latent code from the history of art.
In my sculptural practice, the work often integrates itself into the place in such a way as to draw its meaning from it or to underline its function: the bales of hay in the field, the column in the museum, the billboard on the side of the road. The scale of the objects confronts both the place and the visitor, through its dimensions similar to those of the monument. The result is a practice close to the in situ, where the context nourishes the intervention and where the intervention nourishes the context.
bottom of page