Martin Désilets (b. 1969, Canada; lives and works in Montreal)

Trained as a painter, Martin Désilets has long explored the fertile tension between painting and photography. His experimental practice is driven by processes of accumulation, repetition, and erasure — gestures through which images are both constructed and dissolved.

Tous les disparates (2025)
In Tous les disparates, Désilets revisits Francisco de Goya’s twenty-two etchings from the Los Disparates series. Each print is photographed in ultra-high resolution, then superimposed into a single image. The resulting composition compresses Goya’s visionary force — its dreamlike intensity, violence, grotesque humor, and tragedy — into a spectral image that seems to hover between revelation and disappearance. The ghosts of Goya’s world persist here as faint traces, barely visible yet profoundly felt.

Matière Noire (2017–)
This work resonates with Matière Noire, also on view at OFFSCREEN — a long-term undertaking that Désilets began in 2017. In this monumental project, the artist systematically photographs every artwork exhibited in museums, layer upon layer, until the accumulated images will eventually merge into an absolute black. Both archival gesture and metaphysical pursuit, Matière Noire questions how the residues of past artworks can converge to generate new pictorial forms. Conceived as a meditation on visual saturation and artistic memory, Matière Noire offers compositions that are at once dense and evanescent — visual fields that invite a slowing of the gaze. Désilets’s project stands as both Noah’s Ark and the Flood: to preserve everything and to obliterate it all — a paradox, and a potent metaphor for the condition of art itself.

His works are held in collections including Photo Élysée, Cantonal Museum for Photography, Lausanne, Switzerland; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada; the Museum of Contemporary Art of Montreal, Canada; and and the National Museum of Fine Arts of Quebec, Canada.

Bigaignon is a Paris-based contemporary art gallery. The line of the gallery finds its roots in the avant-garde movements of minimalism, conceptual art, light & space, abstract art, and in the fields of experimental & conceptual photography for which it has been playing a leading role for almost 10 years. Profoundly engaged in the promotion of artists who work the fundamental elements of light, space and time, whatever the medium they use, the gallery is contributing to the rise of a new avant-garde. As such, with a strong international focus, the gallery defends and promotes the unique vision of artists it represents or supports, whether they be emerging, mid-career or established worldwide, in their quest to propose a new visual vocabulary, to foster a radical approach to art, to challenge their own medium and to explore the full extent of its possibilities.