Combining space with time | Gallery B-312: celebrating all times

As part of the 30th anniversary of the B-312 gallery, Combining space with time–Composing runs until May 7. The exhibition evokes yesterday, today and tomorrow in a staging by Marthe Carrier. With artists Moridja Kitenge Banza, Marion Lessard and Vincent Routhier who are interested in the notions of values, heritage and faith.

Eric Clement
The Press

To mark the 30th anniversary of B-312, which she co-founded, Marthe Carrier, assisted by collaborators, had the former premises of the Belgo gallery – space 312 – reproduced in the main room of the current premises, the space 403. The white 1/2 scale model takes up almost all the space.

We thus go back in time, when B-312, a self-managed center founded by young artists, began in 1991 to distribute contemporary art, encouraging many mediums: painting, sculpture, drawing, video, installation, performance, photography. , sound art and new media. Since its creation, B-312 has presented 250 exhibitions and 800 artists.

The gallery has chosen to reflect on this passing time. To the achievements of the past, to the urgency of living in the present, to this spiral of progress which sees the appearance of new ways of looking at art. The three guest artists, Moridja Kitenge Banza, Marion Lessard and Vincent Routhier, met to share the space of B-312 and mutually reflect their lines of thought. Christianity, as it exists today in many forms, is one of the underlying themes of their works.

Integrating the notion of history into these celebrated times, Moridja Kitenge Banza plunged back into his memories of 1991. As B-312 emerged, looting troubled his youth in Kinshasa, Zaire, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo. First provoked by underpaid soldiers and a difficult economic situation, the looting of stores influenced the personality of the Montreal artist.

The new artistic director of the Circular Workshop has created digital prints made up of archive images of the Zairian event and images of Quebec from the same period. All decorated with motifs that deliberately recall the illuminations of old religious manuscripts, since the artist wanted to create an inclusive narrative to express that social events always have universal value.

Marion Lessard

Marion Lessard used the model of the old offices of B-312 to reproduce it twice inside in a mise en abyme. A reproduction that fits well with her work and her “nested” nature since Marion Lessard is a “collective” of five identities… within the same artist. Its reproduction raises the question of the identity of art and that of the artist, around which revolves the questioning of the precedence of the “chicken or the egg”.

To illustrate her questions, Marion Lessard took images of works by the Florentine painter Giotto (1266-1337) whose art, she says, is at the crossroads between religion and secularism. She created three collages from elements of the 53 frescoes that Giotto made between 1303 and 1306 in the Scrovegni Chapel, Padua. One of the collages refers to the fresco of Last judgement. Marion Lessard has inserted her five identities to represent the artist and creation.

Marion Lessard also incorporated the theme of Hen with golden eggs — Jean de La Fontaine’s fable on greed — with a golden egg, inserted with a beautiful shine into the installation. The golden egg, symbol of value – but also of the gap between wishes and reality – makes the link with the works of Vincent Routhier which revolve around the art of tomorrow and the value of virtual art. through NFTs.

Vincent Routhier

Translating mathematical formulas into images, Vincent Routhier has an abstract and digital vision of art. As he creates on the computer, two years ago he became interested in NFTs, these encrypted works of art that sell for high prices internationally. It presents, digitally, a collection of NFT works belonging to the r0m4.eth entity, worth more than one million, and to which it provides access by QR code in the exhibition hall.

This NFT “exhibition” can also be “visited” using virtual reality glasses. Vincent Routhier has also placed two “physical” works that contain a penetrating luminous halo supposed to represent the space through which the aesthetic experience of observing the collection “passes”. Explanation maybe a little obscure, isn’t it? We are not in the conceptual but in a reality… which is not one!

With this corpus Reversion to Condition, Routhier is, in fact, both in the virtual and in the real. We are all entering a future of which we do not know what it will be made of, particularly with regard to art and its public presentation. Will the galleries last? Stéphane Aquin, Director General of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, recently wondered if, one day, even museums would not disappear… Nothing is ever certain. This celebration of all time at B-312 thus evokes omnipresence and mystery, but also faith. You need it to invest in NFTs! And to believe in the durability of good.