Patrick Bérubé
Et ainsi de suite ... [And So On...]

This fall, two venues in dialogue: the Maison de la culture Marcel-Robidas and Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel à Longueuil, invite the public to discover the fascinating work of Patrick Bérubé, a prominent figure in contemporary Quebec art.

Through immersive installations and assemblage sculptures, Patrick Bérubé transforms everyday, reclaimed, organic, and industrial materials into visual ecosystems that question our relationships with the environment, the living world, and society.

At the Maison de la culture Marcel-Robidas, immerse yourself in a retrospective spanning more than twenty years of artistic practice. At Plein sud, discover the final chapter of an ambitious artistic trilogy.

Two-part opening: September 19, from 2 p.m.

To celebrate the opening of this double exhibition, we invite you to join us for a two-part vernissage taking place at both venues.

The festivities will begin at 2 p.m. at the Maison de la culture Marcel-Robidas, followed by a second gathering at 3:30 p.m. at Plein sud, centre d’exposition en art actuel à Longueuil.

To make getting between the two venues easier, a free shuttle will provide round-trip transportation. This will allow you to fully enjoy the event and celebrate the opening of the double exhibition in the presence of the artist. More details to come

Wine, Boldwin beer, and popcorn will be generously provided.

Free admission. Everyone is welcome.

Maison de la culture

As part of the double exhibition Et ainsi de suite…, the Maison de la culture Marcel-Robidas presents a retrospective devoted to artist Patrick Bérubé. Through a selection of significant works, the exhibition explores the major themes and concerns that have shaped his artistic practice over more than twenty years.

The exhibition is divided into three sections, each focusing on a central concern within his work. The first room examines the mechanisms of repetition that permeate our societies. Cycles, loops, and patterns of reproduction become symbols of a humanity seemingly destined to perpetuate the same mistakes. Control, power, belief, and consumption are approached with irony, revealing the fragility of the systems we construct to give meaning to our existence.

The second room explores our relationship with time, between memory, erasure, and representation. Drawing on archives, images, and remnants of the past, the works reveal how our understanding of reality often rests on incomplete narratives and cultural stereotypes. At the intersection of history, ecology, and consumer society, Patrick Bérubé questions the boundaries humans construct between themselves and their environment, exposing the contradictions that shape the way we inhabit and perceive the world.

Finally, the third room presents a condensed version of Autre/Fois, the first chapter of the Écho/Système trilogy, initiated at the Centre d’art de Kamouraska in 2024. Inspired by the region’s former mills and the transformations brought about by the privatization of agricultural land, Patrick Bérubé explores mycelium, the vast underground network that connects living beings beyond visible boundaries. Autre/Fois explores cycles, mutation, interconnection, and the transmission of knowledge, drawing a powerful metaphor for a world in which biological, social, and cultural phenomena intersect, respond to one another, and exert mutual influence.

Across these three rooms, Patrick Bérubé creates installations in which objects, images, and references interact like the branches and roots of a single organism. Infused with irony and satire, the exhibition offers a critical perspective on capitalism, overconsumption, belief systems, and the vulnerability of ecosystems. The visitor’s curiosity is engaged in weaving connections between clues, moving between ideas, and gradually uncovering the vast rhizomatic network that underlies this universe.

Plein sud

The installation presented by Patrick Bérubé at Plein sud extends several of the questions and reflections introduced in the first two chapters of Écho/Système, presented at the Centre d’art de Kamouraska in 2024 and the Musée d’art de Joliette in 2026. While those works created spaces for slowing down, listening, and reconnecting with the living world, the past, and the present, this third chapter unfolds as a projection toward the future, a meditation on the possible futures of the world and of matter. Materials such as mycelium and copper serve as metaphors for memory and for the invisible networks that connect all forms of life.

Where the previous chapters sought to relearn how to inhabit our environment and reconnect with sensory experience and our presence in the world, the new installation considers the present as a layer of geological time, a fragment embedded within a broader continuum in which evolution, memory, and transformation intertwine. A large layered sculpture made of copper and mycelium, reminiscent of an erratic boulder, emerges as a witness to this world in transition.

An AI-generated video depicting a tracking shot through a forest is projected onto an imposing, translucent metallic LED screen, powerfully emphasizing the boundaries between the real and the virtual. On the floor, a green carpet evokes grass, the natural landscape, as well as the green screen used in film and photography to composite computer-generated imagery. This installation opens a space for reflection on shifting notions of figure and ground, simulation, and perception, echoing new virtual realities that are progressively reshaping our experience of the world.

Both organic and technological, the works explore how networks, whether natural, digital, or social, reconfigure our relationship to ecosystems, time, and memory. Echoing the notion of systems, this final chapter of the trilogy invites us to imagine, speculate, and anticipate, not according to a linear logic of progress, but through a cyclical and fluid understanding of time, in which the future takes root in the past and present, continually regenerating through its contact with the forces of the living world.