From June 8 to July 13, 2024, Martin Bureau takes part in the exhibition L’éternité, si possible at the Maison Abandonnée [Villa Cameline] in Nice, France. The exhibition will then be presented at Salle Alfred-Pellan at the Maison des Arts de Laval from September 15 to November 10, 2024.
“Artist Martin Bureau’s Fugue en ruine majeure series stands at time zero on the timeline traced by the exhibition L’éternité, si possible. We are at the very instant of catastrophe, of the announced end of the great ideological schemes embodied by the pinnacles of religious temples. The works are born of current conflicts that threaten global equilibrium and the notion of peace. On this terrain of war, there is no bias. No one thought is targeted more than another. Instead, the artist offers the observation of a shared failure that leaves only devastation as its trophy.
Bureau’s immersive experience is unsettling. It’s impossible not to sit for a moment and contemplate the glowing landscape of destructive fires and bonfires. Hypnotized, our gaze can hardly turn away from the spectacle of the annihilation of a Quebec church. Enveloping these scenes of carnage, Bach’s Fugue captivates us. We vibrate, we commune and we celebrate a funereal commemoration of an event taking place before our very eyes. With Bureau, ruin is aesthetic and disaster poetic. There is beauty in the end.”
– Jasmine Colizza, curator of the exhibition.
Martin Bureau, Fugue en ruine majeure I, 2024, watercolor on Arches paper on wood, 183 x 305 cm