Le Meilleur des mondes

The artist’s project is inspired by a place in the novel Brave New World in which foetus grow up in jars. The installation that he presents is similar to this place in its external form. It consists of several prisms of frosted glass, all identical, recalling the jars. However, the content of prisms does not refer to the novel. These sculptural compositions play with the vocabulary and scope of still life representations. Into these compositions of objects, stemming from traditional representations, Mathieu Valade incorporates contemporary objects that could refer to the concepts of vanitas and memento mori.

The frosted surface of the prisms show these compositions in a blurred way, even erased. Thus, the sculptural compositions that we cannot fully see are presented as if every surface is a low-resolution screen. As opposed to Huxley’s novel, in which each individual is created in a jar under conditions that enable it to be identical to its neighbour, here, each prism presents us with a starting point for an imaginary world, differing from the others.

Mathieu Valade was born in Salaberry-de-Valleyfield in Montérégie. He earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from UQAM in 2003 and a master’s degree in the same discipline from Laval University in 2005. He has had several exhibitions of his work in Canada and abroad, including solo shows at Duplex100m2 Gallery in Sarajevo, at Latitude 53 (Edmonton, AB) and at Centre Le Lieu (Quebec City). He also has participated in many group events, including the Fourth International Manif d’art in Quebec City and Man Bites Dog at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. He is a founding member of the Pique-Nique collective, an organization carrying out spontaneous art interventions in public places since 2001. Pique-Nique has produced several artistic events. Mathieu Valade also is a professor at Université du Québec à Chicoutimi.