Booth 2.11
Laurence Pilon & Magalie Guérin
Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to participate in NADA New York with works by Laurence Pilon and Magalie Guérin.
Their two distinct practices offer generous personal insights into the artists’ relationship to their craft, revealing the struggle and pleasure of process, the broad possibilities of material, and the necessity of connecting the personal and intellectual to creative actions. In both the ceramic sculptures and oil paintings, we find an almost endearing embrace of alien forms, displaying an almost gratuitous materiality that resonates with the senses the way tidal pools erode rock, or crystals form in caves. Placed in proximity with each other, these works function as speculative models of constant change, bridging the ancient with the modern and conflating geological processes with bodily functions. There is a sensual fluidity and peculiarity to these physical forms that embraces a myriad of temporalities and spatialities, inviting us to shift our thinking away from human-centrism and towards a world in which we are just passing through. Whether this sentiment is read as utopian or dystopian is up to the viewer, but what is clear in both these bodies of work is that observation and geometric reconfiguration play a key role in breaking from linear time and allowing for porous boundaries between mind and matter.
Laurence Pilon is an autistic artist based in Montreal. Following an ongoing interest for the natural world, their current work centers on the use of painting as a mode of posthuman performativity viewed from a neurodivergent perspective. Pilon holds an MFA in Studio Arts from the University of Guelph (2021) and a BFA from Concordia University with great distinction (2015). Throughout their academic background, they received several awards, including the prestigious Joseph-Armand-Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship (SSHRC, University of Guelph) and the Betty Goodwin Prize in Studio Arts (Concordia University). Their most recent solo exhibitions include A Scape Unnamed (Galerie Nicolas Robert, 2021), Holo(geo)biont (Galerie Nicolas Robert, 2020) and It Once Was a Garden (McClure Gallery, 2018). Pilon’s work can be found in the collections of the Art Gallery of Ontario, Hydro-Quebec, Royal Bank of Canada, and Medcan.
Born in Montreal, Magalie Guérin lives and works in Marfa, Texas. In 2011, she received her MFA in Painting and Drawing from the School of the Art Institute in Chicago. Recent solo exhibitions were presented at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (UK); Chapter NY, New York; James Harris, Seattle; Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; Schwarz Contemporary, Berlin; and Anat Egbi, Los Angeles. Her work is in the collection of DePaul Art Museum, Hydro-Québec and Caisse de dépôt et de placement du Québec. She is the author of NOTES ON, a compilation of studio writings published by The Green Lantern Press in 2016. She was recently awarded a Pollock-Krasner Foundation grant (2018), a Chinati Foundation residency (2018), and the Stephen Pace Residency Award for a Mid-Career Painter at The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (2019). She is also represented by Corbett vs Dempsey in Chicago.
