25 April 2025, 7 pm
Morgan Legaré – REINRAUM
Curator: Jean-Michel Quirion
Exhibition from 26.04 to 24.05 2025
Opening hours: Saturdays 2-6pm and by appointment
Special opening hours during KOLONIE WEDDING WEEKEND:
Friday 25.04 7-10pm, Saturday 26.04 & Sun 27.04 2-6pm
Special opening hours during SELLERIE WEEKEND:
Friday 2.05, Saturday 3.05 & Sunday 4.05 2-6pm
Guided tour: Sunday, May 4th at 3 pm
For half a decade, Montreal artist Morgan Legaré has been exploring the bilateral mechanisms between automation and control. As an industrial specialization, automation aims to increase profitability and ensure production quantity and quality through ever-advancing technologies. Consequently, control ensures the reliable operation of a structure or system.
The exhibition title, REINRAUM, is the German translation of “clean room.” This space is understood as a sterile and (over)controlled production environment aimed at minimizing the introduction, generation, and retention of all external elements. According to the artist, industrial and cultural environments share several similarities. Spaces dedicated to contemporary art seem increasingly sterilized for exploration and experimentation. Creative power is influenced by the authority of machines that produce and disseminate art in absolute sterility, whose gears are activated by artists, curators, and cultural workers, increasingly overwhelmed by chains of responsibility.
The current project is mechanically transposed into the former manufacturing district of Gesundbrunnen in Berlin (Germany), where ROSALUX is located. Today, entirely sterilized, coated in white on each of its surfaces, and illuminated by austere neon lights, the place stands out as a “white cube” distinct from its vernacular habitat. From place to place, the artist reuses extruded aluminum profiles to build a room within a room: a mise en abyme of a white cube within a clean room. The structure erected in the center of the gallery operates as a portal to interrelated interstices: from inside to outside, from unstable to graspable, from imperceptible to visible. Through modeled plans with illusionistic effects arranged on a support specific to architects’ plans, a sort of material stimulus, Legaré alters the perception of Berlin visitors through sleight of hand.
The works printed during a research-creation residency at SAGAMIE in Alma (Quebec, Canada) constitute the central element of REINRAUM. It is an accumulation of schematics of recognized Montreal exhibition halls. The images materialize the anticipation of a visual experience: recognizing archetypes of production and diffusion of the cultural industry. They reveal themselves as fixed animations tinted with Prussian blue that activate when our bodies move around the circular device.
Morgan Legaré’s approach becomes increasingly precise without becoming disembodied. The artist’s empirical and technical know-how are automated and controlled by himself. The current body of work de-reconstructs conditioning. It is fabricated both by the artist’s hands in his studio and on his screen, within the white cube itself.
With the support of the Québec Government Office in Germany
The artist:
A native of Trois-Rivières (Quebec, Canada), Morgan Legaré lives and works in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). His practice oscillates between installation and media art. Represented in the Majudia and Ubisoft Montréal collections, as well as several other private collections in Quebec. His work has been presented in solo exhibitions at Fais-moi l’art (2024) in Montreal, curated by Laurent Vernet, at ELEKTRA gallery (2023) in Montreal, at ARTCH (2022) in Montreal and at L’Œil de Poisson (2022) in Quebec City (Quebec, Canada), curated by Jean-Michel Quirion.
The curator:
Jean-Michel Quirion, Master of Museology, Université du Québec en Outaouais (2020), Gatineau, Quebec, Canada. Co-General Manager, Programming at Centre d’art et de diffusion CLARK in Montreal (Quebec, Canada). As an author, he contributes to specialized magazines such as Ciel variable, ESPACE art actuel, Esse arts + opinions, Inter art actuel and Vie des arts. His curatorial projects have been shown at Galerie UQO (2018) and AXENÉO7 (2023) in Gatineau, Carleton University Art Gallery (2022) in Ottawa (Ontario, Canada), DRAC – Art actuel (2022) in Drummondville (Québec, Canada) and L’Œil de Poisson (2022) in Québec City (Québec, Canada).
>> Read the complete presse release
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