Guy Laramée, Guan Yin
Galerie d’Art d’Outremont
May 3—27, 2012

The world is large, but in us it is deep as the sea.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

Art sometimes may be created through excessiveness. But how do we measure the “excessive”? How does the work make us see the refusal of limits that it implies? How is this revealed in sculpture when such an investigation strikes up against the inescapable limits of being? How does one make this limitlessness visible, sensual and palpable, when sculpture itself is constrained by, and in, the material that gives it form — here and now? Might the end evoked be that of humanity itself? Can we succeed in conquering this ultimate frontier with an artwork? Sculpture can enlarge our vision: so much so that we may become very small beside it, overwhelmed. Even when we no longer want life’s smallness and we hope with real passion, who wants to yield to boundaries when life tends to expand?

Excessive By Design

“Immensity is within ourselves,” Bachelard reassures us: it spreads in the motionlessness of reverie and dreams, in that solitude that—for a moment—pulls us closer to eternity, and in the silence that is interminable. Interior immensity anchors us in the here and now while sculpture causes images to ripple between the further and the nearer. In this meditative space, the world is no longer perceived as it is but as some other space in which the faraway

…