After spending time with Catherine Desroches’ work I find myself with a different perspective towards my surroundings. Rocks on the beach arrange themselves into patterns; tree branches reach towards each other without touching; universal geometries replicate themselves fractally in all scales and striations of the environment. Catherine’s work is an exercise in observation, of measuring the circumference of the World, and bearing witness to the Ecological rhythms of our surroundings.

For Catherine, how or why they see things the way they do is not so important. What matters is the active filtering of experiences into the work as a practice of Life affirming itself through all forms of being. Their practice is one of material empathy—a form of observational spirituality attuned to the possibilities of material in the direct environment. « To pay attention, this is our endless and proper work » (Mary Oliver). In other words, the work witnesses the World and the World witnesses the work in turn.

Catherine often expresses the sentiment behind what they do « i just like to draw. » Drawing becomes a compulsory expression of being, finding an equilibrium between inward and outward movements—the tides of the soul. It is an exercise toward peace, beauty, and delineation. It affirms that no matter what you do there is always poetics. For Catherine, working this way preserves something interior, as the eyelid protects the eye. In a direct engagement with marks, with pattern, with surface, these images call upon stories of soulmates, of the energy between matter, of the unfixable state of being rendered in hazy landscapes of ecstasy. They are passages from boundaries of understanding—pulsing in and out of real, unreal, and virtual experiences. These works are commitments to moments of ecstatic vision that appear like a crack in glass and scatter light on the matter of our lived environment. They have the possibility of pulling you into transitory scales and reminding you that this gigantic World is your most immediate equal.

-Text by Avery Suzuki

Catherine Desroches is a Quebec artist based in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal), Canada. Their practice engages with the possibilities of materialism to visualize the gaps between real, unreal, and virtual experiences. This is to maintain the enchanting flow of nothing and everything, to satisfy the soul, and to serve the unfixable state of being - everything you might be chasing, but won’t ever find in a World which you see and sees you in turn. They create images fixated on tenderness and obliteration, geometrical fables surrendering to both reason and emotion, rendering the hazy landscape of ecstasy.

Catherine would like to thank Avery Suzuki, Gary Cherkas, Sophie Latouche, Julie Côté, Mary McNee, Centre Clark, Martin Schop, the cheap sandwiches at dépanneur Lalime, my studio on Louvain, Nicolas Grenier and Paul Andrew Hardy who are true mentors of good, mom and dad, Flora Hammond, Colin Courtney, Gérald Lajoie-Restrepo and all friends for the infinite love and listening.

I would like to dedicate this exhibition to my sweet friend Émilie Dépelteau (2000-2024), taken by illness early this spring.