Martin Désilets

Matière Noire

Specters of Art

The Canadian artist Martin Désilets’ (lives and works in Montreal) experimental photographic practice brings museums and their collections into focus, while paradoxically making them dissapear. Since 2017, he visited museums in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. and photographed the works he encountered.

The book Matière Noire presents Désilets’ series of the same title, which may be characterized as an attempt to exhaust the photographic act and create a new work out of the abundance of shots: they are collected in sets of hundreds and layered. “The superimposition of a multitude of reproductions of works of art—like stars, as it were, whose light no longer reaches us—yields a kind of sensitive stratum, what might be called art’s negative,” Michel Poivert writes. Palimpsests emerge that both preserve and veil the material gathered in them.

The monograph’s extensive plate section is complemented by All the Disasters of War, another major work by the artist, based on Francisco de Goya’s series Distasters of War, as well as by essays by the art historian, curator, and writer Catherine Nichols, the art historian and curator Michel Poivert, and the art historian Pauline Martin.