Opening on Saturday, January 25, at 1 p.m.
Christian Messier’s exhibition La vallée de l’étrange plunges visitors into a zone of ambiguity in which the uncanny is materialized through recent paintings shaped by artificial intelligence. This unsettling dialogue between the familiar and the unknown is supplemented by earlier works that reflect his constant quest for the uncanny. The exhibition offers an immersive experience that challenges perceptions and shakes up points of reference.
Christian Messier’s exhibition La vallée de l’étrange plunges visitors into a zone of ambiguity in which the uncanny is materialized through recent paintings shaped by artificial intelligence. This unsettling dialogue between the familiar and the unknown is supplemented by earlier works that reflect his constant quest for the uncanny. The exhibition offers an immersive experience that challenges perceptions and shakes up points of reference.
This original series of large paintings, titled La vallée de l’étrange, presents odd characters who find themselves in uncomfortable situations but behave as if everything were utterly normal. People looking at these paintings, in their turn, experience empathy and feel the sense of malaise – one that is, paradoxically, joyous. These recent works (2024) were created with artificial intelligence, which contributes to the sense of the uncanny that Messier was looking for. The eponymous video exposes this feeling even more strongly, as Messier has used digital tools to create disturbing transformations of the characters through morphing and metamorphoses.
In this corpus, Messier explores the uncanny (S. Freud) and its technological derivative, the concept of the “uncanny valley,” which gives the exhibition its title. The uncanny is an unsettled feeling caused by confusion between the strange and the familiar. The uncanny valley (M. Mori) is a theory according to which the more similar an android robot is to a human being, the more monstrous its imperfections appear.
The exhibition also includes earlier works: a series of paintings, in a different style, titled Rétrospective de l’étrange (2010–23), and La genèse de l’étrange (1998–2008), a set of collages that bring to mind European photomontages of the 1920s and 1930s.
With this grouping, produced over a long period (1998–2024), visitors are invited to appreciate Messier’s various bodies of work, which share the common denominator of the notion of the uncanny. Further, we understand through his pieces that images do not involve vision alone; it is as if, by empathy, they encompass the totality of the viewer, appealing to the sensory, the mental, and the social.
© Christian Messier, Promotional video of the exhibition La vallée de l’étrange presented at EXPRESSION from January 25 to April 20, 2025, 48 s.