Artist Statement/ Biography

Martin Désilets delves into the fundamentals of photography and explore its misuses. In the prevailing surfeit and dematerialization of images, he is interested in tenuous phenomena tied to the diffusion and the materiality of light, as well as in the effects of an ever-more totalizing digital encoding of the real. He takes several photographs that presuppose the absence or the intentional misapplication of various technical parameters, or that are superimposed on one another to the exhaustion of the photographed motif, or even the very act of photography. In 2017, he began "Matière noire", a procedurally photographic work that is set within an extended temporality. "Matière noire" consists of photographing "all" modern and current visual works and superimposing the images into a single digital file until full black is achieved.

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Martin Désilets (Montreal, Canada) holds an MFA from Université du Québec à Montréal. After his residency at the NARS Foundation, he will pursue his "Dark Matter" project at the Christoph Merian Foundation in Basel. His work has been featured in many exhibitions. Venues include, in Montreal, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Occurrence, B-312, Circa, and Optica; the Maison des arts in Laval; G44 Gallery, in Toronto; Oakville Galleries, in Oakville; Geste Paris, in Paris; The Institut für Alles Mögliche, in Berlin; and Espace SD, in Beirut. Many of his works can be found in various public and private collections, such as the collection of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the collection of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. The artist would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Longueuil.