Willy LeMaitre
at the end of the road - a mirror

From February 1 to March 25, 2025

Galerie Nicolas Robert, Toronto is pleased to present an exhibition of the most recent work of Willy LeMaitre (b. Montreal, 1965, lives/works Toronto). LeMaitre’s work has been at the forefront of experimental media practices in Canada and internationally since the early ‘90s. Beginning as a painter and segueing through expanded cinema, in recent years his practice has focused on 3D lenticular photographs, virtual reality, and complex multi-image sculptures. He describes these works as the ‘inhabited image’ - where an image based artwork is experienced in space as well as in our bodies, 'an image we occupy rather than one that represents for us'.

The exhibitions works initially appear as paintings or photographs, but in person experience slowly reveal them to be something much more perceptually unstable and difficult to untangle visually and materially.  Composed from digital images initially printed on a mesh fabric surface over paper, this semi-translucent organza is stretched over an aluminum frame, like a painting’s canvas.  This allows us to see the printed photograph on its surface but also past it, looking within the spatial depth of the frame as well. Within this liminal space, the companion paper images are cut, curled and applied the rear of the mesh image, developing moire pattern and complex formal relations.The representational aspect of the images on the surfaces all contain the natural world, with the fractals of foliage, often reflected or framed by the aperture of a human hand. 

The exhibition continues with a singular VR work that transforms the galleries office into an embodied summer landscape. LeMaitre has created a meditative, interactive visual and sound composition; merging the in person surroundings of the galleries architecture with the natural world. at the end of the road - a mirror offers a series of generous and confounding perceptual experiences, impossible to replicate through a singular image or video, but reward our contemplation, and ask for a consideration of the relationship between the natural world and our own biological, technological and culturally mediated experience of it.

Willy LeMaitre has exhibited nationally and internationally including  Fonderie Darling, Montreal (2022); Canada Gallery, NY (2022); NADA House, NY (2021), University of Windsor/Detroit CCS (2019); MOCA, Jacksonville, FL (2017)  Gallerie West Den Haag, Netherlands, (2017); TIFF Cinematheque, (2016); Baryshnikov Arts Center, NY (2011); New Museum (2003);  Bitforms, NY (2002); The Kitchen, NY, (1999).