L’ART S’AFFICHE
Emmanuel Laflamme
The Theatre of Reality
“I like the idea of displaying artwork on the facade of Ubisoft’s offices, so that passers-by can access art simply by walking through the city. L’art s’affiche allows artists to reach a different audience in an unexpected and accessible way.”
Listen to the artist
Art Souterrain is proud to present the 16th edition of L’art s’affiche, in collaboration with Ubisoft Montreal.
For three months, Ubisoft will host a solo exhibition of the works of artist Emmanuel Laflamme in the Mile-End, on the exterior facade of her studio at the corner of Saint-Viateur and Saint-Dominique streets.
Emmanuel Laflamme
Biography
Emmanuel Laflamme is a visual artist from Montreal whose practice explores the contradictions of contemporary culture. A self-taught artist, he has developed over the past decade a body of work that moves fluidly between collage, painting, installation, and video—where the visual worlds of consumer society, technology, and art history collide.
His work is distinguished by a playful use of juxtaposition and détournement. By reassembling images drawn from diverse sources—archives, advertising, classical iconography—he creates universes where past and future, the real and the virtual, merge and blur. This critical and ironic approach invites viewers to question their own relationship with images and the myths of modernity.
His work has been exhibited widely in Canada, the United States, and Europe, including in England, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands. In 2024, he took part in a residency at the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans, where he began a series of collages that led to his first European solo exhibition, Le Théâtre de la Réalité, presented at Kalkman gallery in Maastricht in 2025.
Driven by a constant desire for visual and conceptual experimentation, Emmanuel Laflamme continues to investigate the power of images to shape our perception of the world and our relationship to reality.
Artistic Statement
The Theatre of Reality
The Theatre of Reality consists of paintings inspired by a series of collages begun during a residency at the Kolaj Institute in New Orleans in 2024. These works mark a new stage in my practice: the use of traditional collage not only as a tool for visual research, but also as a starting point for independent pictorial explorations.
Each painting echoes the structure and certain symbols of the original collages, while reinterpreting them through the language of painting. Figures, architectures and fragments of images are transformed into patterns, textures and flat areas of colour, giving the whole a dimension that is at once symbolic, allegorical and enigmatic.
Through this work of transposition, I seek to create a dialogue between the intuitive spontaneity of collage and the meditative slowness of the pictorial gesture. The scenes that emerge evoke an intermediate space—between dream and reality, memory and invention—where fragments of the world come together as if on a theatre stage.
The Théâtre de la Réalité thus offers a reflection on the construction of images and on the part of interpretation that each person projects onto what they perceive. These paintings become mirrors in which reality, deconstructed and then recomposed, reveals its profoundly subjective and shifting nature. Everyone is free to contemplate their own vision of reality
