Your face, like a lone nocturnal garden in Worlds where Suns spin round!
(Translated from French)
It is from the prose of Jean Genet that the simulated gardens of Susy Oliveira find their source. In this cabinet of curiosities; a fantastic and monstrous Eden, we find; in the metaphor of ecstatic love that the title suggests, the respect and terror that invigorates the beauty and power of nature.
Following a distinct path, Oliveira proceeds with a double intention: materializing into real space the flatness of photography and confounding the reality of these images. This simplified geometrization evokes a synthetic modelling; in this, we find a skilful sculptural work that suggests, by the angular precision of multiple facets, the work of a diamond cutter and the art of
origami.
If the principles of photography are to probe and exploit the potential of light, Oliveira’s current research seems capable of advancing on the obscure terrain of uncertain darkness and sparkling sideral; favouring the night stars to the one of the day, fantasized love to lived relation, the idealized garden to natural experience. The frozen radiance which seems to emanate
vegetation and the crystalline perfection of the prismatic forms leave us to believe that this simulated nature is a creation pulled purely from the void. Here, light and obscurity, lucidity and blindness are relayed by the metaphors of admiration, of a loss of bearings and dazzling sight, themselves suggested by the image of a lover paralysed in love, transported outside one self
and deprived of the mastery of his conscience.
In front of the frightening strangeness of this supernatural garden, we are confronted with a troubling feeling which vaguely mixes the impression of reality and that of fiction, fascination and intimidation, pleasure and discomfort, as in a dream moreover, a nightmare.
Martin Dufrasne
Martin Dufrasne is an artist/curator living in Montréal. Well known for his numerous collaborations with Carl Bouchard (since 1998), he was the 2009 guest curator for the Symposium international d’art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul. Currently he is Programming Coordinator at Dare-Dare in Montréal.