Through Ce qui berce et ce qui noie, Catherine Morin offers a painted passage through our contemporary beliefs, those swallowed whole without pause, pulled in by our insatiable need for meaning. Her canvases unfold between healing rites, conspiratorial fables, and a thin veil of spirituality, tracing a world stretched taut, where the soul reaches for calm even at the expense of reality. 

She tells of a time poised between mysticism and exhaustion, torn apart by belief, drawn toward the sacred, yet fumbling for repair. Water, the apple, medicinal plants recur as symbols, but clarity is never granted. A quiet irony flows through her work, not to mock but to expose the slippages, the moment when care hardens into command. The mystical here is neither refuge nor escape, but a language held in suspension, spoken when certainties collapse and the invisible insists.

First trained in photography, Morin has for decades cultivated a painter’s practice fed by keen observation. Her vision, tender yet incisive, lingers where meanings blur.

L’autre rive réunit une série de toiles d’André Clouâtre, peintre autodidacte dont la pratique se déploie au tournant des années 2000. Issu d’une enfance passée sur la ferme, Clouâtre conserve dans ses tableaux la mémoire du labeur de la terre ; une nature à la fois nourricière et exigeante.

Dans le silence de son atelier-garage, la peinture s’amasse, couche sur couche, comme s’accumulent les années. Pinceaux et spatules recouvrent, grattent, effacent, jusqu’à ce que surgisse le relief. Ce geste, proche de l’art brut, garde la trace d’une lutte engagée avec la matière. 

De ses songes, l’artiste tire des contes qu’il dépose sur toile. L’un d’eux, obsédant, revient souvent : celui des oiseaux qu’il doit nourrir sans toutefois y parvenir, entravé par des machines défaillantes, des obstacles toujours plus nombreux. Ce rêve d’oiseaux affamés devient ainsi métaphore d’une impuissance symbolique. 

Clouâtre convoque également des résonances littéraires, de Boris Vian à d’autres voix souterraines, nourrissant ses propres contes. Chaque toile s’accompagne de fragments de texte, comme autant de clés pour investir les dédales qu’il érige, hantés par l'énigme et suspendus entre les terres labourées et l’appel d’une autre rive. - Curation par Gabrielle Poliquin

Born in France to Franco-Belgian parents, Barbara Ottevaere grew up between two cultures that meet without ever fully blending. This oscillating identity—both a source of richness and strangeness—has long nourished her outlook on the world. Settled in Quebec since the early 2000s, she has anchored her artistic practice there after a path shaped by creative writing and photography. Her work stems from a need to “leave a trace,” to give form to her inner world. For Barbara, clay is both a medium and a language—a living material, receptive to gestures, imprints, and accidents. 

Her process is grounded in experimentation and intuition. Each piece is born through slow time, a succession of states—from shaping to firing—that mark a transition between fragility and permanence. Ottevaere places particular importance on bas-reliefs, forms imbued with a mystical character, found on many monuments and sacred sites. 

Her references draw equally from ancient civilizations and modern art history: Greek vases, anthropomorphic relics of bygone cultures, Delftware, Art Nouveau, or 20th-century painting. Through this hybridity, the artist seeks to create a personal mythology where nature, animals, and humans coexist without hierarchy. Ceramics thus become a poetic means of reflection on our presence in the world and our ability to care for it. — Alicia Lequen