Le soleil ne chauffe que ce qu’il voit :
Haley Bassett, Jimmy Beauquesne, Caroline Cloutier, Kris Knight, Christopher Paul Jordan, Simon Petepiece, Carl Trahan, Justin Weiler

From July 22 to August 30, 2025

For the summer season, Galerie Nicolas Robert Montréal is pleased to present a group exhibition titled Le soleil ne chauffe que ce qu'il voit,  from July 10th to August 30, 2025. 

Through a variety of approaches, the invited artists propose visions where light tends to persist despite the darkness. The works presented will explore certain symbolic imagery to convey a sense of optimism and hope. This imagery will weave its way from work to work, sometimes as the main theme, other times as a symbol or support, presenting itself as a bearer of hope and fulfillment.

Haley Bassett (Grandes Prairies)’s practice incorporates locally harvested natural materials and found objects and spans various mediums, including painting, sculpture, installation, beadwork, and textile arts and explores the connection between self and land, hybridity, and identity. 

Jimmy Beauquesne (Paris) uses drawing as a nostalgic, melancholic and recuperative act. Often borrowing his figures from celebrity culture, Beauquesne's images recontextualize their subjects in a strange, fantastical landscape, blending sacred and pop figures, while commenting on the place of drawing in a post-internet age.

Caroline Cloutier (Montréal) creates abstract works that translate the vibratory nature of existence by playing with colour, pigment and movement. Inspired by sacred geometry and the fundamental structures of life, she seeks to reveal imperceptible patterns, varying from atomic arrangements to celestial trajectories. 

Kris Knight (Toronto) paints romantic portraits that present emotional worlds: portals that lead to the past and present, and that recede from the excess of the world as much as they reflect it. 

Christopher Paul Jordan (Washington) makes works that act as time capsules, preserving, burying, connecting, as well as questioning the survival of memory, diasporic narratives, infrastructures of knowledge, care and communication across distance. 

Simon Petepiece (Montréal) creates works with construction materials and processes that invite the viewer to reflect on the cultural meanings and emotional quality of industrial products. His work questions the way our society conceives and constructs space, as well as its relationship to the environments it inhabits daily.  

Carl Trahan (Montréal) develops a multidisciplinary body of work that refers to pivotal moments in Western history and related philosophical concepts, and finds echoes in the contemporary world. 

Justin Weiler (Paris), through a succession of monochromatic layers, writes his paintings with light to create an image by revealing different layers of black. It's through his exploration of contrasts and superpositions that he treats light, which he considers inseparable from shadow.