Clair-Obscur | Chiaroscuro
Shadow Series
… everything is hidden, dark, veiled; can we expect it to be discovered and unveiled…
Jiddu Krishnamurti
In a constant search for self, the artist digs into memories of childhood, pain, lies and secrets that will never be fully revealed. At times, like a flash, the truth appears. He tries to catch it by a body movement, an intention, a reflection that translates this stealthy moment.
Knowing how to capture this moment is a lifetime’s work. Sometimes, the research is tough, because it is necessary to probe the depths of the unconscious and to be permanently damaged. We never emerge unscathed, even if this research makes it possible to cross the light. This tear is expressed by the carved body, cut and rebuilt. The material is transformed, from an obscure form springs fire. This fugitive moment, captured like an apparition, creates emotion. When the eye is tamed, a wire of steel, a cut – similar to a crack – comes to disturb the established order. The changing silhouettes may seem deceptive, but the artist offers us his truth, a collective unconscious that lives in us all. There’s no going back, because our mind is already on the other side of the mirror. We are now captured by this coded message that is finally given to us. Will we come back? Probably, because we prefer to return to the comfort of our reality. Let the artist himself guide us to the depths of his soul and help him find his way back to the light.
Stéphane Le Duc
TROMPE L’ŒIL & NATTAGE 3D
Originally, there slats crossed that transform paper photography and fractionate information. Intentionally, the image is deconstructed, initiating a vision or a fantasy. The initiatory journey within the image becomes ART and built between the concrete and the abstract.
Beyond the work, a pixelated vision and unbridled bursts and disperses in a multitude of interpretation. The viewer is confused between what he believes to see what he can touch and reality. The artifice of the creative works and gives birth doubt.
Martin Rondeau then creates the image distortion, like his mentor, Jean-Paul Riopelle, ignoring his medium, that exudes the essence of the work through the sham. The superposition of the photographic information imposes a relief superimposed deliberate again pixelated disturbing reading table.
In the end, the illusion is perfectly real. Oversized layers merge. The crust dear to the painter appears palpable. It is like an abstraction, a lyricism to a harmonic series that we return to Automatistes 20th century. The color explodes and catches.
Even today, Martin Rondeau innovates and presents the 3D braiding class 2016
Robert Simard
CONFESSION Series
CONFIDENCE
None mortal can keep a secret. If lips remain silent, it is the fingers which speak. The treason oozes by all the pores of the skin.
Sigmund Freud
By confessing on his desires, his passions or his desires the man releases himself from his inhibitions and opens to him even. To let go on his sufferings, and thus on the past, allows to take place in an instant of eternity when everything lives, where everything flash of lightning and becomes just. By revealing our internal wounds, the confession allows to explore our ambiguities and our desires. This introspection entails risks, because this discovery, unlimited visible, is not without consequence. It is by the fruit of a long reflection that the artist-photographer-sculptor Martin Rondeau approaches these themes through painting disturb so much that they seduce.
The subjects confess and give way to the look inquisitive and sometimes collusive in the photographer. Body fascination, the sublimation of the plastic art or the search for the unconscious in the slightest folds of the flesh. This putting “abime” obliges us the questioning, because it is the darkest, the most impenetrable part of our personality whom the artist expresses in this series of paintings. The place of an internal chaos, a surplus of feelings prevents us from living.
But why do we feel(do smell) the need, we would say almost the urgency, to tell? Because, sometimes, the feelings can be unbearable and then, he(it) becomes necessary to translate them into words or into images to make them go out, expel them and so feel itself more relieved, because if the emotion does not find the vehicle of the word, it resorts(turns) to the mindless gesture(movement). «To confess» calms down the pain and cure.
Stéphane Le Duc
GREEN GRASS Series
‘’The grass is greener on the other side of the fence’’.
Everything seems better way, why this desire? I want to look like another, be and live like him. I want to be that which is next door. What lies behind the facade it you? Everything seems to be perfect, beautiful. Is that still the case?
Seemingly, there is a perception, what is believed to be real. Could this be an illusion, a ghost, a provocation? Then immersed in the image and then, on reflection, we explore and discover what lies behind … a story, true, not always the one we imagine.
The image is raw or misleading. The contrast is striking, transports the viewer in its own way distorted memories. Nudity confronts nature, omnipresent, attracts and animates the looks, suggests and destabilizing. Rasterization creates an abstract division and always increases the possibilities of interpretation.
Martin Rondeau creates distortion by lathing, making substantially reveal the work’s quintessence. As with Impressionist, information flanges installed a state, pixelated, broken, shredded, torn, disturbing reading table. The illusion is always perfection.
Revisiting the memories, which we forge, at the dawn of our consciousness. Childhood is what builds us and mark us forever. As much as look in obsession, somewhere between truth and sham. For Rondeau, accept the past is always true.
Here Green Grass Martin Rondeau
Robert Simard
« 38″ 18″ 33″ » Series
Following the success of his first solo exhibit at Espace B51 in the spring of 2007, artist photographer Martin Rondeau is back this autumn with a new plastic exhibit enigmatically entitled : 38’’ 18’’ 33’’. Winning combination?
In his first solo, the large photographs of the exhibit ‘IMG_48X72’ attracted a crowd curious to see what was produced by Martin RONDEAU’s artistic experimentation. The majority of the exhibited pieces found homes among avid art collectors and young new amateurs.
CAPTURING THE AUDIENCES GAZE AND CONFUSING THE SENSES seems to have become RONDEAU’s modus operandi. Seizing the gaze however, is definitely largely attributed to strategies of seduction contrived by the artist. Representations of the woman’s body are predominant in his work, but her body is lacerated, perforated, blended, and embroidered with surgical perfection. Duality is at the core of his work, as his creativity is expressed by means of an almost clinical technique.
A LATENT WAR OF THE SEXES. In his new series, from one piece to the other, the mix of the one with the other, the male with the female, creates a contrast, either subtle or blatant. Our notions of corporeal and aesthetic perfection are put into question by means of trashy or pornographic iconography inevitably pushing the viewer towards an introspection of the media, and fashion. This questioning, without complaisance, touches upon generic images produced by our capitalist consumer culture. RONDEAU’s work is not victimization, culpability or a radical denunciation, but a play on contemporary imagery to bring to the fore our societal perversions.
ENLIGHTENMENT AND ORNAMENTATION. RONDEAU’s ‘woman’ acts as a symbol with various associative meanings, on the one hand femme fatal, warrior, princess and on the other defined simply as a logo, or an object. She remains always an accomplice of her dichotomies, always being defined by the other’s point of view. In fact, the journalist Stéphane Leduc coined a few questions in the face of RONDEAU’s women, ‘Am I myth or reality? Am I a dream or an illusion? Am I desired or rejected? Am I flesh or plastic? Am I an object or desire? Am I Marilyn or Venus? Am I consumption or expression? Am I a code or a password? Am I sex or love? Am I an icon or a fantasy? Am I you?’
THE TOOLS. Patience and determination mark RONDEAU’s artistic process, as his work is almost compulsively perfect and involves meticulously sliced strands of enormous photographic prints, which are then woven together, braided so tightly as to create a unified image from fragmented parts. One could say that his photographs under go a kind of surgical procedure; gloves, scalpel, insertions, incisions, and the whole in an antiseptic white room (no slip ups allowed).
DOUBLE CUT. As a 2D sculptor in low relief, RONDEAU reconfigures and transfigures his original prints. Days worth of interlacing and knitting, such that the final image is a composition of multiple images. The product is therefore unique, as a special chemistry holds the disparate parts together, creating a whole new image.
Am I the myth or the reality?
Am I the dream or the illusion?
Am I wished or to reject?
Am I of flesh or plastic?
Am I the object or the desire?
Am I Marilyn or Venus?
Am I of consumption or expression?
Am I a code or a password?
Am I the sex or love?
Am I an icon or a fantasy?
You am I?
Stéphane Le Duc
«IMG_48x72» Series
From May 24th till June 8th, 2007
“Vernissage” on Wednesday, May 23rd as from 17 hours
Gallery: Espace51
Entitled «IMG_48x72», the exhibition offers an unpublished look on the artistic practice of Rondeau.
The photography is its medium of preference and it remains. But this time, rather than to glorify the essence of his subjects, the artist favors a plastic approach by disrupting, perturbing, the expectation and the look of the visitor.
Expect the interference, the break, the transgression, these distortion, the healing, in brief, of the distance.
From paper prints in double large formats (48 x 72 «, where from the title of the series), Rondeau went of cuts and » weaving » persisted its medium there. It results from it unique photomontages which «intensify» the initial shooting, crystallizes it, loosens it.
In their geometrical constancy, these interlacing act as a kneaded in layers but take away us from no languishing feeling.
Emmanuel Galland