The artist Shary Boyle presents at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts her first major solo since she took over the Canadian pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2013. With In front of the palace of the Meit deals with these masks that we wear in society and that stick to our skin.
During a press visit last Tuesday, Mr.me Boyle introduced us to the dark entrance to his exhibition, an entrance leading to what looks like a theater, as a “transitional space inspired by the one where the actors take a moment before entering the stage. This space will indeed make you think of the backstage, a place where the actor or actress, alone with himself, concentrates for a last moment, enters the skin of his character, assembles the various elements of his character. , before going public. And what is interesting — she added — is that we do all this, every day of our lives. Before crossing the door of our house, we must also make ourselves presentable and become a little different person than the one we are in private or when we are alone. This place is intended as a metaphor for our existence. And the work of the visual artist is also related to this structure. Every time I go to my studio, I also have to put in place a process of assembly, of concentration, in order to give shape to a vision in which I believe”.
Just to the right of this entrance, the visitor will see, through a window, a small room which will support this statement. Three impressive sculpted heads, of appalling beauty, are placed in a small space reminiscent of a dressing room where the actors make up and do their hair in order to truly embody their theatrical identity. A bit like each of us does every morning, getting ready in his bathroom in order to properly personify his social function or the idea he has of himself.
Even if we are not sure — far from it — that there is in the private a moment of truth for our beings, a man of total “cleansing”, this introduction invites us to a most relevant reflection, always to redo .
To appear or not to appear?
Thus begins this new Boyle exhibition from the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. The installation stages the fact that the world is a theatre, a place in which social identities are represented as roles, a world of appearances where “we look at others, but where we are also looked at”. A world where we like to be looked at, where we also look at ourselves a lot… Egos and narcissism play a big role in this sometimes ridiculous spectacle of life, a spectacle to which the medium of the arts does not escape.
Once past these scenes, the spectator will find himself on a stage, as if he were really an actor. Didn’t Honoré de Balzac teach us that the world is a vast human comedy, a dramatic comedy where Man shows himself capable of the worst as well as the best deeds? The spectator will have to cross this stage where works are installed in order to be able to go into the performance hall and even into an area resembling an orchestra pit, where he can listen to music. In this regard, we would certainly have liked the music to be a more present actor in this show and not just be relegated to a secondary role, heard as muted. It even plays against the grain of the grandiloquence of the rest of the exhibition.
The exhibited works — sculptures made of porcelain, terracotta, sandstone or drawings made in ink and gouache — embody this theatrical spirit very well. A work is called drag showanother one Ventriloquist…Other titles represent those who fabricate representations — The sculptress, The painter, the potter —, but also well-defined, well-stereotyped types of individuals or characters, such as The Sybarites, beings in search of pleasure, luxury, refinement… The richness of the materials, the profusion of collages of very heterogeneous shapes also contribute to this idea of the theater where one must wear costumes, wigs, prostheses to lie down the nose or the chin, masks also sometimes. The exhibition has a certain je-ne-sais-quoi of a circus or commedia dell’arte atmosphere. An entire section is dedicated to the puppet show. You will see there, among other things, an appropriation of the character of Baptiste in children of paradisefilm by Marcel Carné, where the mime plays with a puppet.
This exhibition of course deals with what we call gender roles, genders as social construction, an idea developed by Judith Butler. Boyle also talks about the weight of history and culture on our identities. Images deal with the role of inferiors and victims given to women, of white identity as the dominant model… Explaining his approach, Boyle even took the opportunity to say how in Canada the debate on identity issues was often reduced to an opposition between Anglophones and Francophones, leaving aside many racial questions.
But Boyle’s work is much more than a successful illustration of good social or morally acceptable values. She invokes a dreamlike world, a world where we must dream and sometimes face our monsters together… And art is certainly a fabulous way to create the collective imagination in order to reinvent our roles and the representations of ourselves.