Carl Trahan
The Centre Cannot Hold

March 12 to April 16, 2022

Galerie Nicolas Robert is proud to present The Centre Cannot Hold, an exhibition by Carl Trahan, in our Project Room. The text comes from the poem The Second Coming written by William Butler Yeats in 1919, just after the end of the First World War.

Since 2011, Carl Trahan has been developing multidisciplinary work that explores the period between the Industrial Revolution and World War II. He was first interested in totalitarian periods in Europe, specifically the links between language and the German National Socialist regime, as well as the ambiguous ideological links between Futurism and Italian Fascism. Subsequently, his interest focused on the 19th century in order to better understand the context that allowed the development of extremist thoughts that led to the two great world conflicts.

Carl Trahan has regularly exhibited in solo and group exhibitions since the mid-1990s. He has participated in group exhibitions in Havana, Berlin, Rome, Toronto, and Créteil (France) and has also carried out several artist residencies in Berlin, Paris, and Rome, among others, as well as in Espoo, Finland. In 2016, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec awarded him its biennial art prize and in 2017 they provided him the opportunity to present his first museum exhibition. In 2021, his work was shown at the Musée d'art de Joliette, notably in the solo exhibition Loin de tous les soleils, and at the Mackenzie Art Gallery, in Regina, Saskatchewan, in the group show Pasapkedjinawong—la rivière qui passe entre les rochers.