Split into two parts, an exhibition of works by Jean-Sébastien Denis entitled Extensions, décalages et propos ambigus sur la plasticité will occupy both Galleries 2 and 3. Faithful to his method of creating through addition, the artist will present a dozen recent works on paper, although this time that has involved the provisional collage of various elements more than the use of the digital. The bright, sometimes fluorescent, colours that have made their appearance in his work of the last few years are certainly present here on Mylar, and contribute to the artist’s organized chaos.    

The fact that the exhibition takes up two areas of the gallery is not pure happenstance. The galleries made available to the artist establish a kind of dialogue, even a form of contamination, in such a way as to create a synergy between the two spaces. Their walls become porous boundaries. While, in Gallery 2, Jean-Sébastien Denis’ works on paper mirror the compositions of certain Plasticiens, in Gallery 3 he takes the idea further by using works by those same artists as basic material. The artist employs the intimate space of the gallery as an object—a complete work—on display, the result of an effort begun in a true laboratory ten days earlier. Extension: Gallery 3examines various notions, such as the concept of framing, the duality of the lasting and the ephemeral, the ways in which we display works in galleries and their limitations, specific to the field of the visual arts.

Accompanying Jean-Sébastien Denis on his investigation will be Paul Bradley, storyteller and director of communications at the gallery. Progress on this public act of art-making by Jean-Sébastien Denis will be documented and, beginning October 9, can be followed online at the following address: http://www.galeriesimonblais.com/en/room-3