Maude Corriveau
Contours

From April 9 to May 17, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert is pleased to present Contours, an exhibition by Maude Corriveau. Through a new series of pastels on paper, the artist explores the porosity of images by integrating undulating, oil-painted frames. These borders do not merely delineate the image but merge with it, blurring the boundary between the represented space and its physical surroundings. Their fluid lines evoke instability—a dissolution of the traditional frame, which historically serves to contain and structure the image.

Corriveau investigates the frame in both its sculptural and pictorial dimensions, playing with tensions between flexibility and rigidity, movement and stasis, depth and surface. Each uniquely rounded frame spills into the image, absorbing and extending its hues and optical effects. Her work features blinds, veils, and glass surfaces that fold and unfold in rhythm with shifting light and color, heightening the oscillation between interior and exterior. In some drawings, the artist photographs the frame’s glass before rendering it, creating a layered mise en abyme. The recurring curtain motif nods to art historical simulacra while evoking digital filters that distort our perception of reality. This interplay of reflections and reproductions interrogates the nature and materiality of contemporary images.

Inspired by virtual aesthetics, Corriveau creates works where transparency and light converse with matter. The vibrant, unstable pigments of dry pastel never fully settle, applied in thin layers that recall the sensuality of powders and makeup, adding a tactile quality to her exploration. The ambiguity of her compositions arises from the interplay between pigmented areas and the raw gray paper, which actively shapes the visual dynamics. The drawing diffracts, propagates, and perpetually redefines itself, guiding the viewer’s gaze between depth and flatness, image and object—offering visions in ceaseless metamorphosis.

This process reflects a broader meditation on the entropy of visual and cultural systems today. In a world saturated with screens and interfaces that reframe our relationship with reality, Contours presents drawings with fluid edges as a contemplative experience. The image becomes a threshold between the tangible and the evanescent—a mutable surface that unsettles perception and questions the very nature of the visible.

Maude Corriveau lives and works in Montreal. She holds a master's degree in visual and media arts from the Université du Québec à Montréal (2020). She is a recipient of the prestigious Yvonne L. Bombardier Graduate Fellowship in Visual Arts (2019). Her work has been exhibited in Canada and in the United States and is part of numerous private and corporate collections, such as the Mouvement Desjardins and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec (MNBAQ).