Monique Allain - UTOPIAS

GROUNDING EXPERIENCES AND HABITATIONS - Connecting with the space

IDENTITY - Self Connections - Memories and experimentation of an expanded time in the present

UTOPIAS - Between Photography and Painting

2018 - 2014

Square Utopic Landscape 2, Utopic Landscapes series, 3 editions, print in Hahnemeühle 200 alpha cellulose paper of hybrid of digital photography and painting, 39.4 x 39.4 in, 2017.

Utopic Landscape 1, Utopic Landscapes series, Hybrid photography and painting, 40 x 80 in, 2017.

Axiom, From Air and Water series, Hybrid photography and painting, 40 x 80 in, 2014.

From Air and Water, From Air and Water series, Hybrid photography and painting, 40 x 80 in, 2014.

Body & Space & Body, From Air and Water series, Hybrid photography and painting, From Air and Water, 40 x 80 in, 2014.

New Hybrid, From Air and Water series, Hybrid photography and painting, 40 x 40 in, 2014.

AQUATIC UTOPIAS

These waters are waters that flow between two worlds ... the physical and the virtual; they erase the boundaries that separate those worlds and merge to form a single ocean.

Electronic media have enabled the emergence of a new image quality, an image / text that does not reveal its origin, which forgets or even loses it at some point in the formation process. The contemporary image absorbs and synthesizes all types of images into a single category.

The Aquatic Utopias are mixtures of paintings, photographs and stills of videos edited on the computer. Some of the hybrid images, after being printed, are reworked with paint.

Fragment of Aquatic Utopia 7 Stained in Red, Print on Fine Art Paper of hybrid photography and paint with archival ink, 6 x 6 in, 2018.

Fragment of Aquatic Utopia 9 Stained in Red, Print on Fine Art Paper of hybrid photography and paint with archival ink, 6 x 6 in, 2018.

Aquatic Utopia 1 in Two Pixels, Aquatic Utopias series, Hybrid photography and painting, print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Aquatic Utopia 2 in Two Pixels, Aquatic Utopias series, Hybrid photography and painting, print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Aquatic Utopia 1 in Two Pixels, Aquatic Utopias series, Hybrid photography and painting, print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Aquatic Utopia 10 in Two Pixels, Aquatic Utopias series, Hybrid photography and painting, print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Variation 3 in Two Pixels, Print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Stones 2, Print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Stones 3, Print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

Stones, 1, Print on Hahnemdeühle 200 alpha celulose paper, 20 x 40 in, 2017.

UTOPIAS (as well as the HORIZONS), are landscapes from an undefined field between reality and fiction. They are places of dream, of desire, of reunion with our primordial human condition.

HORIZON is the “circumscribed”, the “achievable”, the “present time limit”. It is a referential concept that gives us the conscious perception of “SER”[1] and “ESTAR”[2] here and now. The horizon define a potential of possibilities and range of motion, in which the AR we breathe is contained. It is a realm of existence in the world.

In large urban centers such as São Paulo, dense "verticality" is dominant and interrupts the field of vision. The surrounding space has shrunk radically, and with it, the AR and the prospects for movement. We almost don’t see horizon anymore. There is a feeling of suffocation and claustrophobia. How to adjust to this reality?

The constructed poetic images are mutants and hybrids fictions of horizon & space. They attempt to subvert the "verticality" of the configuration of the urban space, so to make visible the horizons contained in the little things of everyday life.

Works of these two series present some crossings between the media that constitute the contemporary image. Paintings, photographs and videos resulting from experiments and actions of the sensitive body function as autonomous pieces or as base elements for compositions of hybrid works. Media blend and dialogue with each other. The immobility and movement of the images, their flatness and volume when incorporating the shape of the objects in which they are inscribed, instigate a reflection on the relationships they establish with space and time.

The various forms of the image today converge to a same territory. This makes increasingly difficult to differentiate it into categories, both in terms of technique and in terms of the way of representation and presentation. Intermediate zones expand and constitute a common place in which nature and origin are lost, where the limits between physical reality and fiction are dissolved.

The works seeks to reveal the common aspects nowadays between painting, photography and video. What is pictorial, cinematographic, photographic and sonorous in the contemporary image? The idea is to investigate the potentialities and the implications that arise from the complexity of it.

[1] “BEING” refers to a permanent condition – expansion of time.

[2] “BEING” refers to a transitory location or condition – expansion of space.

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