From June 8 through September 1, 2023, the Espace VERRE gallery will present CARPE VITRUM the exhibition featuring the works of the 32nd group of graduates of the fine craft – glass option programme offered in collaboration with the Cégep du Vieux Montréal. Following three years of studying, discovering, and exploring the various glass art techniques, this event will mark the beginning of Renaud Gagné-Turbide, Samuel “Samwell” Guertin and Jacques-Éric Pronovost into the professional world.

 

If Renaud Gagné-Turbide is no stranger to glass, because of his family’s involvement in the profession, it was only after finding out about the existence of the programme that he decided to embark on his own artistic path. Since then, he has enjoyed working in the hot glass studio, where the demands of glass blowing, somewhat of a performance, has persistently pushed him to progress in that discipline. Renaud’s hot sculpted and blown glass objects inspire us to relive history and foster the uniqueness of the handmade. His expression piece is inspired by the traditional Korean moon jars which are often composed of two hemispherical halves joined in the middle. This gives them natural and slightly irregular forms contributing to their appeal. Renaud sees this conceptual concept as an evocation of vulnerability and fragility, two notions that add to their beauty, such as for instance scars that tell a story, and traces of life that reveal a certain character. In working with glass, a superbly unforgiving material, he found the imperfection which becomes the signature of the one that shapes it.

The unbridled creativity of Samuel “Samwell” Guertin has brought him to explore many artistic disciplines. If glass has become an important material of creation in the past few years, he successfully combines, due to his remarkably innovative and integrational capabilities, different concepts, and techniques. Instinctively guided by symmetry and repetition, he approaches glass in both the crystalline and fluid states which permits him to explore the ambivalence of the material, the harmony between what is orderly and randomly imbalanced, their opposing characteristics, and the intersection of their contradictions. Therefore, Samuel’s pieces play with the contradictory, complimentary and sensorial aspects of glass. With beadwork, he creates pieces whose forms are flexible and geometrically structured yet kinetic. His pâte de perles are transformed in a kiln where the glass aleatorily fuses, resulting in geometric pieces that are simultaneously static in their contour and structurally disordered. Finally, responding to the challenge of the environmental turn, Samuel created his own glass using recycled Bombay Sapphire gin bottles, to create a decorative, functional, and environmentally responsible cinder block.

Searching for the discipline that would permit him to fulfil his yearning of artistic accomplishment, Jacques-Éric Pronovost was seduced in the first hours that he set foot in the hot glass studio, notably by the infinite possibilities of glassblowing. The requirement of the material in terms of the physical dedication of the glass artists and the need for an almost intuitive connection between teammates are also part of the basis of his keen interest for this technique. In the studio, he explores the subjectivity of the human perception by using the effect of superimposing layers of colours. This results in the creation of multi- shaped and multidimensional objects that demonstrates the complexity of our visual universe. For his expression piece, Jacques-Éric seeks to bring to light the inner reflection of each of us individually. It is only by approaching the work that the visitor can discover its center.

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Graphic Design: BERGER.studio

 Source:
Marina Dobel

Executive Director
direction@espaceverre.qc.ca
514-933-6849