Opening: Wednesday, November 28, at 6 p.m. 

Galerie Simon Blais is delighted to present Harmonie et dualité, an exhibition paying tribute to François-Xavier Marange (1948–2012) that features a dozen works in acrylic on canvas, all of them executed between 2003 and 2012.  

Both a printer and a painter, Marange used approaches that were, a priori, opposed: on the one hand, the conventions and expertise of a worker in a traditional craft and, on the other, the experimentation, spontaneous intuition and revelation of the senses proper to an artist. 

François-Xavier Marange’s art is characterized by minimalist works imbued with a forceful serenity. With their floating forms, full of nuances, on plain backgrounds, the contrasts within them are at once obvious and subtle. Such forms evoke fragments in both material and formal terms. In the first instance material, because the artist crushed stones and mixed them with pigments to create the seemingly floating forms. Then, on the formal level, because their outlines are abraded through stumping, which suggests shattered entities removed from a larger whole. Alone on a solid surface, the fragment appears, like a precious artifact.