Pascal Grandmaison
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MECHANICAL DREAM: OHI PLANT, NIKON INC., JAPON, 19 Digital chromogenic print mounted
| The exact is superior to the vague... The exact is superior to the vague, Realty is superior to imitation, 2008 Digital chromogenic print mounted on Plexiglas
| THE MEMORY, THE FEEDBACK, 2008 Digital chromogenic print mounted
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Desperate Island, 2010 installation view, Casino du Luxembourg Forum d'Art Contemporain, 2011
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Desperate Island , 2010 10 sculptures, hydrostone plaster, fiberglass, studio photo background paper, 42'' h x 34'' W x 24'' D | Half of the Darkness , 2010 360 color ink jet prints (10 x 8" each), 4 pedestals
| Half of the Darkness , 2010 360 color ink jet prints (10 x 8" each), 4 pedestals
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Soleil Différé, 2010 Video HD 15:00
| Void View, 2010 28 ink jet prints
| Moment of Reason, 2011 4 inkjet prints mounted on aluminum
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Believing Cloud 02, 2011 Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
| Believing Cloud 04, 2011 Inkjet print mounted on aluminum
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If one travelled in a straight line Series of 40, 2010
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An active presence on the contemporary art scene here and abroad since the latter part of the 1990s, Pascal Grandmaison has been critically acclaimed for his distinctive use of photography and film. This Montreal artist has been described in the National Post as “the stuff of art stardom.” Grandmaison is known for the contemplative subjects that occupy his large photographs. In his Verre series (2003-4) Grandmaison defies familiar conventions of the portrait genre, capturing psychological complexity and vulnerability through a minimal and detached view. Grandmaison re-visits historical technical and conceptual advances in film and photography in this pure meeting of function and form.
In his more recent Background series (2008) Grandmaison refers cryptically to the scene in Antonioni’s 1966 film masterpiece, “Blow-up,” where the photographer’s back-drop paper, surely a symbol of the artifice of the photographic image, is brought tumbling down in a crumpled heap. His rainbow-like linear compositions, Mechanical Dream (2008), are reminiscent of large-scale abstract paintings of the 1960s, however they originate in the diminutive focal length markers found on the reflex camera lens, thus becoming an elegantly subtle homage to a past moment of instrumental design.
In 2007 his work was exhibited in group shows at Centre Culturel Canadien, Paris, Frace; Exestentie, Gent, Belgium; Abbaye Saint André; and the Laznia Centre for Contemporary Art, Gdansk, and the Centre for Contemporary Art, Ujazdowski Castle, Warsaw, Poland. Recent solo exhibitions include Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal; The National Gallery, Ottawa; Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa; and the Art Gallery of Hamilton.
Exhibitions
Pascal Grandmaison / Barbara Probst
Pascal Grandmaison: Mechanical Dreams
Transfomer
Pascal Grandmaison: Soleil Différé
In Rotation