The exhibition, presented by FIAMS, focuses on L’Arche de la fuite dans l’imaginaire, a monumental sculpture created in the early 2000s by pataphysician Florent Veilleux (1941-2023). A number of curiosity cabinets complete the exhibition, providing an overview of Veilleux’s colossal lifetime of work, including luminokinetic installations and absurd, derisory and utopian machines.

Veilleux’s artistic installations are essentially made from recycled industrial and everyday objects, which he transforms, robotizes and sets in paradoxical situations. In his works, scraps become contemporary 20th-century automatons, a kind of postmodern sculptural exquisite corpse, totally deconstructed.

His monumental work is a mechanically metamorphosed synthesis of the products that society has consumed and discarded; the 20th century told through the objects that lived through it.

Florent Veilleux’s absurd machines capture the imagination of all and sundry in a colorful language where the desire to amaze is omnipresent. His so-called “folk art” is accessible, wildly unbridled and imaginative, while maintaining a critical, non-indulgent view of the technology from which it largely springs.

The exhibition is as interesting historically as it is socially and environmentally.

“Through their constant scientific humor, my machines are designed to mystify the adult, and to catalyze the child’s spirit of observation and reflection, imagination and ensuing creativity” -Florent Veilleux

*A posthumous tribute will be paid to the artist on Saturday, July 29 at 7:30 p.m. at Place Nikitoutagan. On this occasion, the objects and mechanisms of the monumental work L’Arche de la fuite dans l’imaginaire will be activated to bring the installation to life.