Image: Julie Ouellet, Indocile, Galerie Simon Blais, Montréal.
A new exhibition of Julie Ouellet’s intaglio prints brings together approximately 20 works made between 2019 and 2021 during a residency at Montréal’s Atelier Circulaire. The project extends a body of work first presented in the exhibition ‘Ligne sous presse’ at the same printmaking centre.
The exhibition is announced in a Galerie Simon Blais newsletter, which provides details of Ouellet’s printmaking research but does not specify exhibition dates or a venue for this presentation in the supplied material. The gallery’s newsletter describes the project as the second part of a corpus developed through Ouellet’s residency.
Ouellet uses intaglio—known in French as taille-douce—to test the limits of her drawing practice. Rather than treating printmaking as a process governed by fixed conventions, she uses the medium to challenge those rules and to reconsider how a drawing can be produced, altered and transferred.
The works emerge from a method that deliberately combines control with uncertainty. According to the exhibition text, Ouellet’s approach is instinctive and receptive to chance and accident. She subjects the artistic gesture to constraint, allowing the limits imposed by the printmaking process to generate unexpected results.
That tension between mastery and unpredictability is central to the project. The newsletter describes Ouellet as blurring the boundaries of the medium and allowing experimentation to shift its established codes. In this account, the prints are not simply the outcome of a technical process; they are records of a negotiation between deliberate action and the incidents that occur during making.
The residency works date from 2019 to 2021 and were produced at Atelier Circulaire. The newsletter additionally identifies the François-Xavier Marange Research Grant from the UQAM Foundation as having made the residency possible. The grant is presented as part of the circumstances behind the research corpus, while the exhibition focuses on the resulting prints and Ouellet’s exploration of intaglio.
Galerie Simon Blais, based at 5420 Saint-Laurent Boulevard in Montréal, says it has presented emerging and established artists since 1989 across painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking and photography. Julie Ouellet appears among the artists listed on the gallery’s website. The supplied announcement gives no opening date, closing date or confirmed location for the presentation of her new intaglio prints.
