Thresholds
Nathalie Bachand, Canada Council for the Arts
Entropic engines and retooled appliances: Michel de Broin and the technological unconscious
Daniel Sherer, Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal
Between the Possible and the Impossible
Nathalie de Blois, Musée national des beaux arts du Québec
Sculpture of Steel, City of Nerves
Bernard Schütze, Espace art actuel
Michel de Broin at Bitform Gallery
Darren Jones, Artforum
Michel de Broin
Bryne McLaughlin, Art in America
Michel de Broin BMO Project Room
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art
Disruption From Within
Rodney LaTourelle, Plug-In ICA
A Logic of Being Against?
Bernard Lamarche, Parachute
Interview
Michel de Broin, Etienne Zack, Mass MoCA
Fluid, Data, Blood: New Sculptures by Michel de Broin
Anna Kovler, Arsenal Contemporary
Where is Michel de Broin?
Anne Schreiber, Art Net Magazine
Montreal’s Retired Metro Cars Are Staying Busy
Mark Byrnes, City Lab
Interview with Michel de Broin
Regine, We Make Money Not Art
Castles Made of Sand
Bryne McLaughlin, BMO Project Space
Danger awakens the senses: An interview
Oli Sorenson, MKOS
Bright Matter
Sarah Milroy, Canadian Art Magazine
Michel de Broin
John K Grande, Border Crossing Magazine
Cities of Light
Bryne McLaughlin, Canadian Art Magazine
From Mad Scientist to Pied Piper
Shannon Anderson, Canadian Art Magazine
Michel de Broin at Mercer Union
Alex Snukal, Uncubed Magazine
Neue Heimat
Bernard Schutze, Berlinische Galerie
Art as Conspiracy
Jean-Ernest Joos, ETC Montreal
Propulsion and entropy
Bernard Schutze, C-Magazine
Reverse Entropy
Thomas Wulfen, Kunstlerhaus Bethanien
Objests for Objoys: the attraction of the unforeseen
Stephen Wright, Semaine
Épater la Galerie
Jean-Ernest Joos, Villa Merkel
L’espace public mis à nu par l’artiste même
Jean-Philippe Uzel, Spirale Magazine
Résistance?
André-L. Paré, Etc. Magazine

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

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