Le cabinet de réflexion

Archives of the solo exhibition
Plein Sud, Longueuil
May 25 – June 20 juin 2010
Booklet – text by Jerôme Delgado

“Le Cabinet de Réflexion, as it exists today in various Scottish and French rituals, is almost certainly less than two hundred years old. However, it corresponds to a dimension of initiatory rituals that transcend time and place. Indeed, the isolation of a neophyte in a hut or a cave has been practiced since the dawn of time. This process involves the separation of the neophyte from his family and the representation, by isolation in a closed space, of death, a rupture to prepare the way for an essential change, like the chrysalis in its cocoon. This analogy, as the one of a return to the maternal womb, corresponds to deep psychic reality. Le Cabinet de Réflexion is essentially the modern adaptation of the ancient initiatory hut.”

Excerpt from (free translation): Daniel Beresniak, Le cabinet de réflexion – La démarche initiatique, technique de l’éveil, 1974.

Presented at the art center Plein Sud in 2010,  “Le cabinet de réflexion” is a multimedia installation combining drawings, objects, sculptures and a video projection. Finding inspiration in the tradition of the cabinet of curiosity and the “cabinet de réflexion” of freemasonry, the project explored the practice of collecting as a site to dream about oneself and a space to reinvent and reconstruct a past. Microcosm and small theater, the cabinet revealed itself through mirrors and reversals, black and white, apparition and disappearance. The exhibition gathered extracts from the collection “La sirène, l’âne et le bouleau” – a corpus of drawings and objects created in 2008-2010 – and a video installation titled “Le papier maléfique”. Following the logic of the reversals inhabiting the exhibition, the video was projected on the back of a large drawing; a self-portrait executed by the “collector” of the cabinet. The projection, in a large dark room, presented a drawing in progress as a looping self-portrait that mirrors the processes of making and undoing.