Marie-Claude Bouthillier presents a new exhibition at Occurrence, where she features her alter ego, Marinette. As endearing as it is comical, the puppet, which it is good to find, is the protagonist of sketches shown in a film. With this character, the painter known for her abstractions with deconstructed grid patterns emphasizes narration, thus brilliantly bringing together aspects that are a priori distant from her practice.
Marinette’s first release dates back to 2018, at MACLAU in Saint-Jérôme, where Bouthillier presented Cards on the table. Throughout his collaboration with the restorer Richard Gagné, then curator of the exhibition, the artist decided to bring to light the creature born on the sidelines of a molding course. Since then, the one to whom the artist lends her sartorial look and her physical features has stood out in her approach, always appearing in short staging encapsulated in video.
Marie-Claude Bouthillier recounts the birth of the puppet in a podcast launched by the artist-run center simultaneously with the exhibition – and that of Carol Wainio. The visual arts student Mathilde Varanese is masterfully leading this pilot cultural mediation project entitled Point bleu, which, in the form of an interview with the artist, effectively sheds light on the intentions behind the works. Here, it is the words of the artist that is authoritative.
Delegate figure
With Marinette, Bouthillier herself stages the artist’s words. Unlike the seriously concocted mediation tool, however, it does not lend its speech an explanatory aim. Rather, it turns it into a space of fiction, narrative invention and self-fiction where literary references are interwoven with allusions to the Tarot, art history and current affairs.
It goes with reflections on the status of the artist, more “ant” than “cicada”, but sometimes the “fish” which bites on the hook of curator or historian of art. “Let’s remain vigilant! »She recommends. It also exposes the cycle, bordering on the absurd, of the production of works that are piled up, stored, or reexamined the legacy of congeners consecrated by history, whether Robert Filliou or Marcel Duchamp. The Sofonisba Anguissola and Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven make their appearance there, among other things, perhaps indicative of feminist concerns.
The figure of Marinette shatters the artist’s myths as much as it summons them with its melancholy, its potential to sink into pathos or to resist the devil. Unlike the anecdotes that have punctuated the lives of artists since Antiquity and which had the function of coating their image with the marvelous, those of Marinette often end with amusing and, to say the least, desacralizing pirouettes.
Castelet
This is not the first time that Bouthillier has taken an interest in the artist’s myths and his romantic clichés. She has tracked down in literature the recurring motifs from which she even drew inspiration to make a Tarot card game, another passion that Marinette also claims to be, all the same a little embarrassed to admit. “Oops … yes, yes, I’m pulling the cards,” she said, surprised by the camera, in one of the sketches.
Marinette allows artist Bouthillier to reconcile and accept all of these things, freeing up speech while maintaining a dose of mystery. Marinette “plays” the oracle for the camera. She makes the signs speak, but gives no answer; she says she is rather biased or often chooses to dodge. In the room, the position of the projected image, the furniture for sitting down as well as the painted works hung in an angle formally echo this oblique position of the character.
In this device, we recognize the artist’s attraction for the installation, an attraction she has expressed in the past in elaborate environments of unmounted painted canvases. Although set back, the painting persists here, in these “samples” on the walls of the gallery and also in the film where the decorations are carefully worked, handmade, sometimes evoking the domestic universe, sometimes the workshop with its essays. pictorial.
Each of the sequences is presented as a painting, a still life, a genre that traditionally symbolizes death and human finitude. With her castelet, Marie-Claude Bouthillier does not rule out painting from which she brings out conventions and certain ingredients of her canonical history. Somewhere too, it is as if, retroactively, the painter’s abstractions had always been the canvas of fictions in the making, of narrative threads in search of characters.
Carol Wainio’s critical fabrications