When you first enter Galerie Joyce Yahouda you will be struck by the wall-sized drawings by Montreal based artist François Morelli. Their overwhelming size and fleshy pink colour practically pull you in. Reminiscent of Morelli’s sculptural work, the drawings feature swirling lines which meld into cages, hollow torsos morphing into animal heads, internal and external body parts swap places, and every side is up. It is a dizzying and spellbinding metamorphosis of haunting dreams. Morelli terms this the oneiric, or dream-like, pictoral space, and he describes his latest series as “illustrations of inexistent poems in which images precede words.”

The dream-like state is also expressed in Morelli’s earlier work. Take a moment to leaf through the artist’s sketch books of the late 1980s. The cloudy, wet-in-wet watercolours with their pigments fingering across the thick, beige paper evoke drowsy, floating dreams.

The smaller gallery space shows Morelli’s video installation The Crossing, which screens videos from his Moon Walk series. For these video works the artist wrapped one foot in a flag which symbolizes the Moon – a white circle centred on a royal blue background – and then walked across various terrains. These short rambles become an artistic gesture, one that Morelli invites viewers to participate in. The gallery floor is covered by a massive version of the Moon Flag, and visitors to the gallery are invited to “walk on the Moon,” echoing Morelli’s performance in the videos.

Galerie Joyce Yahouda, space 516
François Morelli
The Crossing
November 10 – January 12, 2012
www.joyceyahoudagallery.com