“If there can be a better way for the real world to include the one of images, it will require an ecology not only of real things but of images as well.”
―Susan Sontag, On Photography

“Nature speaks in equations.”
―Charles Seife, Zero

The world appears to us as a complex system oscillating between meaning and noise, order and chaos, zero and infinity.

The field of quantum mechanics deploys numbers and language to describe the behaviour of matter at the smallest possible scale. Interestingly, the smaller the scale, the less predictable the behaviour. And yet, meaning emerges. Matter organizes into order. Existence divides and multiplies. Numbers and language render the abstract concrete.

It is these most fundamental building blocks that the artist Andrea Szilasi takes as her raw material to refashion a new vocabulary of images. I meet Szilasi at McBride Contemporain in the Belgo Building to discuss her latest exhibition, entitled Réfléchir, a collection of recent works that blur the lines between photography and collage, writing and cut-ups, science and art.

“I like that game where you say a word over and over again until you don’t recognize it anymore,” Szilasi explains. “I feel like I’m doing that with language and digits and space. I really see the letters and numbers loosening up the meaning of the images.”

Comprised of black-and-white architectural photographs from the 1960s and ‘70s, upon which Szilasi applies broken fragments of vinyl lettering and digits, Réfléchir reflects both backwards in time and projects forwards through space, in doing so, inviting a radical reinterpretation of conventional representational forms.

“There are many ways to be in the world,” Szilasi muses. “But obviously language and numbers are pretty basic. There’s a natural sense of order. The sun rises and sets every day and there’s seasons, and we time seconds and minutes and hours and years. ‘Cycles’ is a good word. Raw life is very orderly. And then, of course, it is completely chaotic. People do things to each other that don’t make sense.”

Explanation, however, is not explicitly Szilasi’s intention, preferring to let intuition guide her practice. While she is rigorous, Szilasi is not buttonholed by any traditional doctrines.

“I embrace accidents and chance,” she declares. “When I’m actually making art, nothing is conscious at all. But I consciously do that. I don’t see it in an egotistical way — that it’s my creativity. We all need this complete trust in our intuition. I see it as an active decision to follow intuition. I love dealing with positive and negative space. I think about it a lot. It’s not the most obvious thing. It’s subtle and hidden. Looking at images, they are visual configurations of lights and darks, shapes and colours, regardless of what they’re representing.”

Born and raised in Montreal, Szilasi studied French Language and Literature and Film Studies at the University of Toronto and returned to this city to pursue a degree in Painting and Drawing at Concordia University. “I loved Eisenstein’s high-contrast images,” she recalls. “And I had a course on Dada and Surrealism in Cinema. It was in me when I was making my early collages — the importance of stream of consciousness as opposed to realism.”

Szilasi had her first solo exhibition in 1994 at Centre Clark. “They were collages,” she remembers, “hand-made using found images from scientific magazines.”

Szilasi got her start in the Montreal arts community as an integral part of artist-run galleries and on various local committees. “I was on the board of Articule,” she tells me. “I think Montreal is a great city for artists. But it’s getting so much more expensive for studios. People used to have huge loft spaces on the Plateau. That was super fun. I knew a lot of painters who had lofts who would ride their bikes to go to the bathroom. That seems like the past.”

In addition to her own noteworthy career, Szilasi shoulders the responsibility of a significant creative legacy. Her father, Gabor, remains among the most recognized and beloved documentary photographers in the province, working from 1959 to 1971 at the Office du film du Québec. Szilasi recalls using her dad’s contact sheets to make collages and greeting cards as a child.

“It’s a really big deal, and it’s a huge, huge influence,” Szilasi acknowledges. “I admire my father’s work, so this is a way of embracing it. I love photography. I’m just using it and physically embracing it, always, in every way. But I would never say I’m a photographer. To be considered a photographer, you need an ability to use the material, the medium, to say what you want to.”

McBride Contemporain’s Director Soad Carrier helps to frame Szilasi’s practice from a gallerist’s perspective. “She’s always been interested in wanting to go through the photograph, or under the surface,” says Carrier. “This exhibition taps into that. Even with the title, Réfléchir, there’s a direct reference to the surface of things, and light, and the way it’s refracted and moving.”

Carrier regularly visited Szilasi in her studio over the past year-and-a-half, carefully selecting works to include in the show. “You can see the interaction of the pieces together as they’re being produced,” she says. “It’s really exciting.”

Szilasi’s reluctance to be categorized, rather than conceding to her father’s fame, exposes to me a comfort in interdisciplinarity and a confidence in ambiguity. She walks us over to a series of manipulated Polaroid photographs that figure prominently into her exhibition, images that draw the viewer in with their diminutive size and surprisingly quotidian hyperrealism.

“These are from when I was in art school,” Szilasi tells me. “The actual Polaroids are from the late ‘80s and early ‘90s. But this past year, I made them into collages. I have other Polaroids that are finished works. But I applied some vinyl letters to these — and there’s also Letraset. I’ve been making photos more over the last few years.”

I ask Szilasi if she ever considered another profession. “No,” she says without hesitation. “But I remember thinking that before going into studio arts, it’s good to have another background in more historical, academic things. So that’s what I did.”

A sense of place manifests less in Szilasi’s visual images than it did in her father’s. She says, “I try to get beneath geography and politics.” Nonetheless, the risks she takes as an artist are indicative of an ecosystem that encourages us to measure the arts’ value differently. It is not just a game of numbers.

“Art is the first thing that gets cut in budgets,” Szilasi laments.

“I think art is so essential for people being able to notice subtleties and just listen to each other and all those things that we don’t see in politicians, or in the media. Indirectly, art does affect politics because it has to do with value systems. Even in really concrete ways, when people do drawings, you forget what you’re looking at. It gives an openness. That’s the role of art. I used to take it for granted. But now it’s something that has to be defended, politically. Art is about values. But there’s less value in the arts. Art is an outlet for everything. It builds empathy. I think about that all the time.”◼︎

Réfléchir runs through 21 February 2026 at McBride Contemporain, 372 Rue Sainte-Catherine Ouest, Suite 414.

_{Cover image for NicheMTL courtesy of McBride Contemporain and the artist.}