Dominique Pétrin

A master serigrapher, Dominique Pétrin deploys her practice in a subtle interplay of manipulation and collage of hand-printed sheets of paper. For a number of years, bright motifs juxtaposed against pictograms inspired by popular culture in immersive, sometimes monumental installations have been emblematic of Dominique’s projects. In her in situ interventions, she tricks our perceptions by creating effects that influence our cognitive processes, forcing us to question both the nature of what we see and how we understand and interpret it.

For Dominique, the residency at Est-Nord-Est was no doubt a space for gathering energy so that she could refocus her research on her current concerns. She immersed herself in a corpus in which she abandoned figurative references and concentrated on the potential of motif and colour to speak of contemplation and ritual. Although ornamentation is historically closely linked to places of worship, she explored the notion of the sacred in a unique way, through the prism of individuality; distancing herself from fixed or dogmatic conceptions of the religious, she investigated ways that we can erect our own temples.

Although this research seems vast and intangible, the free-standing works that Dominique made during her residency hinted at its essence. She made collages mounted on stretchers attached to portable, and therefore movable, metal structures. This device allowed her to place her works in interaction with the shoreline landscape, to subject them to the light and reflections that change as the day progresses. Placed against the horizon, each work gave the impression of a macroscopic view of a fragment of nature visible in its most elementary form, exposing the geometric division of its very structure. By linking the dimension of the infinitely close and circumscribed to that of the distant expanse, Dominique spoke to us of the balance necessary to have a full perception of the world.