2026 | Karine Fréchette | TORONTO: Au jardin des miroirs tordus

Blouin Division is pleased to present Au jardin des miroirs tordus, a series of new paintings by Montreal-based artist Karine Fréchette, marking her first exhibition at the gallery in Toronto.

Au jardin des miroirs tordus brings together a body of work developed through a process in which the image transforms via various visual, digital, and pictorial mediations. Conceived for the exhibition, this approach extends the artist’s ongoing inquiry into the relationships between natural phenomena, corporeality, visual technologies, and painting.

For these paintings, titled Vanités, the floral motif serves less as a subject than as a starting point. From staged arrangements of commercially cultivated flowers, Fréchette develops a documentation process that involves various analog tools - prisms, crystal spheres, concave mirrors, or metal spoons. By employing these handcrafted devices, the artist sets in motion a layered process of transformation, through which an experience that is at once visual and physical emerges.

Vegetal forms intertwine, stretch, and fold at once, emerging in electric mauves and blues, hues typical of the artist’s palette, taking the form of gerberas or daisies with unexpected appearances. While the details of the compositions reveal a certain insistence on remaining anchored in the source material, it is rather what the reflective surfaces reveal, and the trajectory of the representation through its alterations, that becomes the true subject of the work. Fréchette’s approach to painting is slow and deliberate: it involves successive negotiations, sometimes directly on the canvas, yielding works that paradoxically echo the qualities of screen-based images. This visual circulation, in constant transformation, manifests itself as organic drapery with anthropomorphic qualities. Within this garden of twisted mirrors, each reflection invites contemplation of the perception of the living in the ever-shifting flow of digital content.