Collection: PANSER

Yannick De Serre and Caroline Boileau are both artists I represent, and I wanted to bring them together once I saw how closely their worlds spoke to each other — both return to the body, to raw emotion, to grief, and to care, each through a very different artistic vocabulary.

Yannick De Serre works as a nurse in intensive care, and that daily closeness to illness and death runs through everything he makes. In his work, the wound becomes literal material: bandages embroidered with sutures that spell out words — Healing, I Care, Guérison — as if naming the wound could already begin to close it. In his hollowed-out books, a surgical instrument engraved with Latin words — Memento Mori, Memento Vivere — waits inside a cavity cut into the pages, caught between the memory of death and the reminder to live. Everything passes first through a gentle gesture — wrapping, closing, embroidering — before the harder truth is allowed to show, a truth he has sat with at patients' bedsides.

In Caroline Boileau's work, watercolour carries the body and its wounds, and the research began with something personal: accompanying her father through the end of his life. Her series Aidances ici et là follows hands that tend, hesitate, and suffer — a vocabulary drawn directly from the gestures of grief and caregiving. In Sourcières et profondeuses, some twenty small watercolours, tucked into cracks in the floor or mounted on metal stands, use pale, feminine tones that poorly disguise the murky water underneath — brown, orange, never blue — water that carries what it's touched and never fully lets it go.

What struck me, setting their work side by side, was that same tenderness turned toward what wounds — fed, in one case, by the everyday rhythms of intensive care, and in the other, by the loss of a father — translated through two almost opposite materials: the bandage for one, water for the other — to wrap a wound, or to let it soak. Panser brings these two worlds into a single room: one where what doesn't fully heal is cared for anyway.

Caroline Boileau is a multidisciplinary artist, independent curator, and educator based in Montreal. Working from a feminist perspective with a particular interest in health — intimate, public, social, and political — she creates hybrid works spanning installation, drawing, video, and performance. The hybrid body and its many representations, especially the female body, run through her research, drawing on art history, the history of medicine and science, and current events. In her drawing practice she works primarily in watercolour, layered with graphite, ink, and collage from old literary and medical books, treating each gesture on paper as irreversible, closer to performance than illustration. Since the mid-1990s she has taken part in numerous artist residencies and exhibited across Canada and internationally, including as the Michele Larose – William Osler Artist-in-Residence at the Osler Library of the History of Medicine, McGill University (2018–2019), and as Artist-in-Residence with the Chaire McConnell – Université de Montréal on the reclamation of motherhood (2020–2024).

Yannick De Serre explores the extended practices of engraving and drawing, orchestrating the contrast of emotions — love and hate, life and death, absence and presence — through the encounter of two- and three-dimensional works. His practice is deeply shaped by his work as a nurse in an intensive care unit. The great sensitivity of that world meets, in his art, a softness that envelops and comforts before giving way to harder truths — work that moves between gentleness and violence and invites the viewer into a genuinely empathic experience. De Serre holds a bachelor's degree in visual arts from Université Laval. He has exhibited across Quebec and at major international fairs (Papier, 2015–2018; Art Basel, 2013; TIAF, 2011; Sydney and New York, 2010), and in 2012 the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul acquired one of his works, now held alongside pieces in numerous private and institutional collections.