It was written in the sky that the artists Maude Arès and Massimo Guerrera were to meet as their artistic approach stimulates points of rapprochement. However, barely a year ago, the one who is on the verge of her thirties and the one who has a 30-year career knew almost nothing of their respective existence. It is up to the B-312 gallery to have concretized their meeting in a highly original proposal aimed at underlining the 30 years of the artist-run centre.
For the program of this anniversary, celebrated in three special exhibitions of which this is the first, the two artists have decided to reinvent themselves as a duo, immediately abolishing the boundaries of their personal signature in a daring open creative process activated even in the gallery which hosts their installation.
The work evolves over the weeks, with the artists sculpting and drawing, sometimes exposing to the public the choreography of their gestures executed in tandem. One of the greatest merits of the proposal lies in this bridge thrown between two generations that artists materialize from time to time.
That’s not all. While their protean creations stand at ground level, against the walls, they enclose an element imposed by the organizing committee: the 1:2 scale model of the room occupied by the center at its beginnings, on the third floor of this same building as the Belgo. B-312 remains faithful to it, unlike other venues that have left it in recent years, proof that the current art circuit has changed with the changes in the metropolis.
In the great hall, the structure rises like a ghost from the past. The artists also wanted to measure themselves against the history of the centre, finding an ingenious way of revisiting previous programs to identify all the exhibitions held there. They will henceforth be part of this history, which they are however careful not to set up as a monument.
Network of meanings
The whole thing is more like a counter-monument. The materials embody precarious and miniaturized compositions which fall horizontally or which, patched up, soar timidly vertically.
Instead of overwhelming by its presence, the central structure is a foil. It redirects the gaze on what surrounds it, and what it contains, celebrating less an official history, its own, than the unpublished production generated by the meeting of artists, in the present of their actions. The title also indicates the complexity of the program: fluid states. Between the hardness of doing and the delicacy of blushers.
The artists claim to have bought practically nothing for this exhibition, which requalifies the remains found in the wastelands near their studio, where a railway line crosses, like at her home, north of rue Chabanel, and at his home, in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve district. As urban archaeologists, they excavated the rubble together, unearthing objects and materials that they methodically collected, transformed and organized on displays, half-altars, half-museum supports.
The gestures posed establish a network of meanings between the finds saved from abandonment, witnesses of a society that cares little about consuming and throwing away. Attentive, the artists are interested in the patina left by time on the objects to which they lend new potentialities, even the smallest bit of colored thread. These little nothings make up “suspended sculptures”, which are held together only by the pressure of the concerted hands of the artists, for the time of a pose.
Among all the materials, clay is perhaps the one that stands out, having been taken from the shelves of a trade. The two artists, who are used to working with it, incorporate it in all its states, dry and solid or wet and soft. The sculptures bear the traces of manipulations, it seems still unfinished. They materialize the common language developed by the duo, at work and at rest.
Indeed, the distinction between art and non-art is confused before our eyes since blankets on the ground invite relaxation. A few fruits are also lying around as a sign of snacks taken on the premises.
presence in the world
These signs of life are typical of the works of Ares and Guerrera, who are also involved in the invention of “tool-sculptures”, some of which are in the small room. These tools are presented as creatures with which the artists team up to produce “landscape drawings” on the ground, large washes that evoke a fragile balance between controlled and accidental effects.
It is as if the artists lent matter and objects a life of their own with which they come into contact, respectful in their way of inscribing each time their presence in the sensory world, and with others.
They had the same attention in the excavation of the archives of the center, deploying on the walls of the replica of the first room the boxes of varnishing which made the promotion of the past exhibitions. The frieze follows a logic defined by the duo, who wanted to favor formal links, other energy networks, rather than a chronological order. Usually far from the photo image, the artists surprise here, creating a hiatus with the rest of the exhibition.
Office furniture recreated in miniature fortunately reinscribes their touch within this makeshift cenacle. In the combined eyes of Maude Arès and Massimo Guerrera, it is the relevance of the artists’ center which appears, as an important place of dissemination for emerging or established artists, in the support of practices still in turmoil, in short, in this risky and lively niche of an art in the making.