Audrey-Ève Goulet breaks the gallery wall with 'Synergy'

Most galleries have a rule: look, but don't touch. Audrey-Ève Goulet broke that rule.

For her latest exhibition, Synergy, the Montreal-based abstract painter transformed the familiar gallery experience into something dimensional — a space where sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch all play a role. It's a departure from convention, and it stems from how Goulet itself creates: intuitively, without a fixed endpoint, letting the work unfold as it needs to.

"I want to break that distance," she told Montreal Rampage in an interview about the show. "Art shouldn't be locked behind glass."

Goulet's path to abstract painting was unconventional. She started as a guitarist — music remains woven into her practice — and picked up graphic design and photography along the way. Then, at 18 or 19, a friend asked if she could paint something for him. "I had never painted in my life," she remembers. "But I said, 'Yeah sure, I'll do one.' I discovered a true passion in doing it."

That first painting sold at a loss — the materials cost more than what she charged. But friends' parents started commissioning work, and soon people were telling her to raise her prices. One friend's mother wanted three paintings and, when Goulet named a price, said, "Oh no, you need to raise your prices!"

That encouragement mattered. Goulet had been discouraged about art in high school — she was "really bad at it," she recalls. But her teacher saw something: real creativity, a tendency to think outside the box. In high school you're often asked to paint flowers and follow structure. Goulet wanted improvisation.

Her early work was more figurative; she incorporated writing into paintings. But it always leaned abstract. Her favourite painters — Jean-Michel Basquiat, artists working in semi-abstract styles — all shared that quality: intuition, soul, depth, a sense that the work emerged rather than was planned.

"I like improvisation," Goulet says. "The idea of not having a fixed starting point, or a fixed end point." With abstract painting, she's done when she feels like it. The style shifted from figurative to purely abstract naturally, a reflection of what she'd always loved.

For Synergy, Goulet created a piece called Coquillage on wood — one of several mediums she works across, following Basquiat's lead of painting on canvas, cardboard, wood, whatever the work demands. But Synergy isn't just about the paintings. It's about breaking the invisible wall between art and viewer.

The exhibition marks a shift in how Goulet thinks about accessibility. Abstract art can feel distant, intellectual, intimidating to people who don't have formal training. Synergy asks: what if it wasn't? What if you could touch it, hear it, taste it, smell it, see it — experience it as a full human being rather than as a passive observer behind velvet rope?

That philosophy — that art should meet people where they are, should invite rather than exclude — runs through everything Goulet does now. She's not interested in gatekeeping creativity. She's interested in breaking distance.

For Montreal's art scene, where experimental galleries and artist-run spaces have long pushed against convention, Synergy feels like a natural next step. The city's got a deep tradition of artists who make work on their own terms, in their own spaces, without waiting for institutional permission. Goulet's doing the same thing — just with the added radical act of letting people actually touch the work.