Between the Possible and the Impossible, Nathalie de Blois
Musée national des beaux arts du Québec
Sofia, Inkjet print, 110 x 200 cm, 2003
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.
His heterogeneous and yet astoundingly coherent body of work has been built on a multifarious play of references to philosophy, language, science, art history, psychology and political and social issues. His work becomes the site of putting the mechanisms of power to the test, giving birth to a range of associations which inspire the discovery of plurality. Resistance, entropy, circulation, mobility, exchange and communication: these are concepts which lead the viewer to the circularity of movement, meaning and desire and which are the inherent concerns of an artistic project whose great fascination lies in the fact that it has succeeded in establishing hitherto unseen relations between distant or even contradictory concepts. By placing side by side art and technology, art and non-art, and the art world and what pertains to everyday life and public space, the spirit of this work is close to the historical avant-garde. But the failure of the great Utopian ideologies is, essentially, what it points up, constantly distorting and betraying itself in a perpetual calling into question. Through a strategy of playfulness and defiance, the oppositions which systematically present themselves in it reveal the search for a boundary point where opposites meet and borders are lifted.
-Excerpt