Caroline Cloutier: Five Key Works in Expanded Perspective

Caroline Cloutier is a Montréal-based visual artist whose work explores the perceptual boundaries between image, architecture, and illusion. Working across photography, print, sculpture, and installation, she creates spatial experiences that challenge the viewer’s sense of depth, symmetry, and continuity. Her practice often employs light, reflection, and folding as strategies to transform space into a contemplative encounter. Cloutier holds an MFA from Université Laval and exhibits internationally, including recent projects with Galerie Nicolas Robert. Her work invites a meditative dialogue between material, perception, and the invisible.

A Lesson from the Flowers (2024): Chromatic intimacy and the abstraction of natural time

A chromatic field of soft yet intense hues - petal pinks, stem greens, pollen yellows - emerges in painterly swells, suggesting both botanical intimacy and abstract emotion.

Here, Cloutier departs from her traditionally architectural and mirrored spaces, offering instead a visual meditation on natural form and impermanence. The layered brushstrokes resist representation, evoking rather the ephemeral scent or memory of flowers. Her handling of paint retains the quiet rigour of her spatial work - this is a lesson in how colour, like space, can fold inward and unfold time. The painting becomes a vessel of emotional tempo: deliberate, delicate, and deeply attuned to silence.

Pink Orange Energy (2023): Energetic resonance and the metaphysics of colour

A luminous wash of blended colour - beginning in a gentle orange at the center and drifting toward blush-pink edges - vibrates beneath a glass-like surface, subtly altered by reflection and ambient light. Cloutier here creates an almost metaphysical colour field. The mirrored Plexiglass doesn’t simply frame the print - it activates it, turning the static gradient into a shifting visual encounter. This piece operates at the threshold between image and event. The viewer’s presence and movement impact its perception, suggesting an aesthetic of mutual co-creation. It invites meditation but denies fixity: like mood, energy, or breath, it exists most fully in flux.

Pliages Series (2019): Folds as form, thought, and silent architecture

The eye encounters near-symmetrical black-and-white forms - geometric, angular, precise - cut and folded in origami-like planes. In this seminal series, Cloutier uses the literal act of folding to undo linear time and fixed space. Drawing inspiration from Deleuzian notions of the fold as a philosophical structure, she reorients the image into an object, and the object into a proposition. The symmetrical patterns become echoes of a world that might exist behind the surface. There is rhythm here, but no repetition - each fold alters meaning. This is abstraction not as simplification, but as complex concealment.

Fragments Series (2022): Partial sight, filtered memory, and optical ethics

Photographic panels partially veiled by translucent, tinted glass refract the spaces they depict. The viewer glimpses, but cannot possess, the entire image."Fragment" is both a formal and conceptual cue. Cloutier invites the viewer into partial visual access, challenging our desire for total comprehension. The coloured glass filters act not as aesthetic garnish, but as intermediaries: they colour not only the image, but our position toward it. The work resonates with architectural minimalism and phenomenological sculpture - it’s Dan Graham meets poetic opacity. Through these layered interventions, Cloutier builds an ethics of looking: beauty is available, but never entirely given.

In-Between (2018): Mirrored corridors and the illusion of continuous presence

Situated inside the Glass House at the Invisible Dog Center in Brooklyn, the work refracts architecture through mirrors arranged to create illusionary tunnels and doubled corridors. "In-Between" is Cloutier’s most architectural and immersive gesture. The mirrored planes defy logic and ground, folding space into an endless corridor of mirrored thresholds. This is architecture as perceptual vertigo. The installation destabilises orientation, encouraging viewers to lose themselves within illusory depth. Yet the work is never chaotic; it possesses a reverent clarity - each reflection meticulously placed. Cloutier does not manipulate space so much as reveal its potential for spiritual multiplicity. It is both site and non-site, frame and threshold.

Caroline Cloutier’s work exists at the edges of visual comprehension. Whether through folding paper, refracting photographs, or washing light across Plexiglass, she creates situations where looking becomes philosophical inquiry. Across her key works, she explores the limits of space, memory, and aesthetic experience—not to define them, but to fold them back into themselves.

Each piece is a room we cannot fully enter, yet feel we have always known.

Images: © Caroline Cloutier, Courtesy of the Artist

Editor: Shuhan Dong