Michael Nardone, Gallery Blouin Division
With Triste Entropique, Michel de Broin reveals a series of new sculptures and image-based works that stand as monuments to a dissipated world. Idols of exhaust, of exhaustion, they condense aethereal flux into mineral form. Dissolution and intensity, erasure and effusion flow as an undercurrent through the exhibition’s material surfaces, which affix these forces for a moment in time and space (...).
Nathalie Bachand, Canada Council for the Arts
Thresholds is an experience in transit. It calls to mind the velocity of our urban journeys, small moments in everyday time and space. The installation remakes the internal mechanics of door-opening devices found on old metro cars manufactured for the inauguration of the Montréal metro at the 1967 World Exhibition. The MR-63 car has now been replaced by more modern equipment, but its impact on the collective Montréal imagination is undeniable (...).
Daniel Sherer, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
The art of Michel de Broin centres on the paradoxical refunctionalization of utilitarian objects, mechanical devices, architecture and urban infrastructure. Ranging across a broad spectrum, it opens new perspectives on the multiple technical systems and forms of mediation that affect our lives, often in intangible ways (...).
Nathalie de Blois, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec
For more than ten years, Michel de Broin has been honing a trans-disciplinary art which calls systems and their articulation into question. Adopting a critical and playful attitude towards common objects and current ideas, he sets out to render visible, through richly profound metaphors and analogies, the forces at work in the movement of the energies which guide our actions and govern our impulses (...).
Bernard Schütze, Espace art actuel
Dendrites, a public artwork recently inaugurated along with its sit — Place de l’Aviation Civile International, is a fascinating and consistent extension of Michel de Broin’s ongoing and prolific art practice. In fact the work combines two elements that are characteristic of his multifaceted approach (...).
Darren Jones, Artforum
Michel de Broin’s US solo debut activates cracked lightbulbs, wood logs, bronze castings, and a bicycle with electric currents. The Montreal-based artist calls upon these basic objects to convey fundamental physical forces, all the while adding a trace of whimsy to his works (...).
Bryne McLaughlin, Art in America
There's a dizzy logic to the work of Montreal artist Michel de Broin. Take, for instance, his sculpture Révolution, a maquette version of which opened his recent survey exhibition at the MACM. Commissioned in 2010 for the Couvent des Jacobins in Rennes, France, the massive work (which remains in France) features a knotted, 100-foot-long steel staircase designed to confound notions of beginning and end.
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art
There is no beginning and no end to Michel de Broin's Castles Made of Sand (2016). Installed high above the Toronto financial district as the most recent commission for the BMO Project Room, de Broin's hulking installation pivots on a simple conceptual proposition: how to construct a machine that builds and rebuilds sandcastles (...).
Rodney LaTourelle, Plug-In ICA
For his first solo exhibition in Western Canada, Michel de Broin presents recent work in various media. His art may take many forms, from traditional sculpture to installations, actions, and video, but it always employs a rupture in the logic of a particular convention, whether it is an object, situation, or process. Perversions, detours, and odd juxtapositions are strategies that repeatedly appear in his work, which uses the combination of unrelated systems in order to expose overlooked preconceptions (...).
Bernard Lamarche, Parachute
Resistance is born of one force’s thwarted affections for another... It does not confront the enemy in order to inflict defeat upon it but struggles with adversity, for which the adversary is only a stand-in, in order to weaken it and make it give in (...).
Michel de Broin, Etienne Zack, Mass MoCA
I recently carried out a performance involving a lumberjack and a lamppost. The historical movement known as “The Age of Enlightenment” or “Age of Reason,” to which Newton belonged, translates to “the Century of Light” in French, light being a synonym of reason and darkness suspected of belonging to witchcraft and magic.
Anna Kovler, Arsenal Contemporary
Michel de Broin is known for using everyday objects to reveal relationships between mechanical and social bodies. Whether adopting a power drill, bicycle, artillery gun or light bulb, his alterations to these tools point beyond objects to the people who use them, becoming metaphors for the flesh-and-bones human body.
Anne Schreiber, Art Net Magazine
(1) Who are you? Michel de Broin. I am what I am concentrating on.
Mark Byrnes, City Lab
Whenever a city updates the rolling stock of its subway, a familiar question emerges: What to do with all the old metro cars? You can hurl them in the ocean to make artificial reefs, or use them for emergency housing for the homeless, or sell them to North Korea, as Berlin did in the 1990s. Or, as in Montreal, you can turn them into public art installations.
Regine, We Make Money Not Art
Michel de Broin hung a gigantic disco-ball over Paris, threw 12 tons of asphalt on the road to create a absurdly twisted bike lane in Montreal, rode his polluting bicycle in parks, knitted New Orleans street lamps into a satellite-shaped structure, silenced an alarm bell under a vacuum system and famously got his pedal-powered 86' Buick Regal car pulled over by the police.
Bryne McLaughlin, BMO Project Space
On the top floor of a downtown Toronto office tower, an elaborate contraption retro engineer by a machinator is simulating an industrial production line.
Oli Sorenson, MKOS
Montréal based artist Michel de Broin is currently showing his solo exhibition at Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Despite his initial proposal to destroy the entire museum façade being declined, De Broin showcases an engaging selection of re-made works from the past two decades, intertwined with new commissions.
Sarah Milroy, Canadian Art Magazine
… With more than a decade’s experience of corralling materials into subversive and surprising new configurations, Michel de Broin brings the world of things to life in ways that transgress expectations and shake up habits of mind.
John K Grande, Border Crossing Magazine
Michel de Broin's art is rife with sensory ambiguities. A slight attenuation of our conventional association with objects that appear functional, renders them poetic. De Broin's unusual and exhuberant dislocation of association blends seduction with an art of resistance. Part Duchampian, overtly conceptual, de Broin plays on and with the pragmatism that forms a central feature of contemporary society's consumer ethos.
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art Magazine
During Nuit Blanche in Paris on the evening of October 4, 2009, de Broin unveiled a 7.5-metre disco ball, covered in 1,000 mirrors and held 60 metres in the air by a crane in front of the palatial French senate building in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
Shannon Anderson, Canadian Art Magazine
At first impression, Michel de Broin’s exhibition at Plug In ICA appears oddly unbalanced. The main gallery is relatively bare, save for a few small pieces scattered about. But turn to the right, and one of de Broin’s large shelter sculptures, made of 10 found tables stacked together to enclose an inaccessible hiding space, is crowded into the small side gallery.
Alex Snukal, Uncubed Magazine
When asked in an interview with art net Magazine about the potential for change in his work, 2007 Sobey prize winner Michel de Broin claimed, “it is probably better to not be held responsible for too much change.” For de Broin, change is inextricably linked with death; it is always involved in the degradation of finite resources “slowly forwarding us towards an inexorable end.”2but what are we to make of an artist who refuses to be held responsible for change yet whose practice centers on the sly transformation of objects and their uses?
Bernard Schutze, Berlinische Galerie
Michel de Broin is an artist who delights in toying with paradox by inviting competing references to take up residence in a materially manifest form. In this approach conceptual moorings are severed by aesthetically confronting the viewer with an assemblage that silences or troubles the ideas it purports to speak for.
Jean-Ernest Joos, ETC Montreal
The question recalls that of the philosopher Martin Heidegger, and this is not just a simple analogy: “Why is there something rather than nothing?” It is with this question that Heidegger summed up 2500 years of metaphysics. With this gesture Heidegger upheld that the essential is no longer in the answer, but in the question itself, which remains necessarily and indefinitely open.
Bernard Schutze, C-Magazine
RESISTANCE has been the driving metaphor and conceptual core of Michel de Broin's artistic work since the mid-90s. A singular feature of the Quebecois artist's approach to this is the creation of physical systems that simultaneously generate a force and thwart it.
Thomas Wulfen, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien
In the late nineteenth century, the American mathematician and physicist Josiah Willard Gibbs published several treatises under the title‚ On the Equilibrium of Heterogeneous Substances‘ in the‚ Transactions of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences‘.
Stephen Wright, Semaine
The various works of Michel de Broin complement one another like the components of a constantly expanding visual vocabulary. As if the existent vocabulary were never sufficient to express the here-and-now; as if life somehow eluded it.
Jean-Ernest Joos, Villa Merkel
Michel de Broin is a perfectly pragmatic artist who attempts to put useless concepts to good use. The intelligence of his project is rooted in the doubt he spreads about the power and value of concepts, which obliges him to truly put them to work in response to the demands of the real.
Jean-Philippe Uzel, Spirale Magazine
Pour comprendre la brève histoire de l'art contemporain, il semble impératif de se pencher sur la dialectique des rapports que les artistes ont entretenus avec l'institution muséale depuis une trentaine d'années.
André-L. Paré, Etc. Magazine
Qu'est-ce que résister ? À quoi, à qui résister ? Plus précisément : qu'en est-il de la résistance dans la pratique artistique actuelle ?