2025.11.08 – 2026.03.07
Michel de Broin: Triste Entropique
Blouin Division | Montréal
Blouin Division is pleased to present Triste Entropique, an exhibition of Michel de Broin’s new works.
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.
One might envision the works of Triste Entropique as though they were antiquities unearthed from the archaeological site of an extinct civilization whose demise we must infer. Perhaps these remnants enshrine the material decadence and infrastructural insufficiency that facilitated that civilization’s cultural demise. Perhaps these excavated items once stood as icons beloved by a society dedicated to the complete exhaustion of their natural world. Perhaps they were the ritual objects of an annihilistic sect who celebrated the sacrifice of energy and who craved to bring their fractured civilization into a burning immanence with the sun.
Here, the etymology of entropy (from the Greek, en + tropē, meaning within + transformation) resonates throughout de Broin’s creations. Yet the relation of these objects to the entropic world is complex, ambivalent. Though a sense of loss is palpable in these works – loss of energy, of ecosystem, of meaning – they do not dwell in deterioration. Against the grain of dispersion, disorder, and oblivion, de Broin’s sculptures suspend time, giving a sensual presence to expenditure, and stand as a testament to our ephemeral existence.
-Michael Nardone