Nicholas Bayer | What program for the human being?

Seven years after his last solo at the Arsenal, Nicolas Baier is back in force at the Blouin Division gallery with an exhibition on our evolution since the arrival of computer programming. The gifted artist in photography, sculpture and digital creation whips our minds with delicate and penetrating works. A great artistic moment in Griffintown.

It is one of the sure values ​​of contemporary art. Quality and content are always there with Nicolas Baier. Toronto, where he has created huge works of public art in recent years, is snapping it up. However, it is little exposed here. Although this art sociologist creates at a breakneck pace in his Mile End studio. And even if his approach generates many lines of thought, mixing science with philosophy.

The exhibition Communicating vessels, of museum quality, includes 36 works, almost all created in 2022 and 2023 by Nicolas Baier and his assistants. In continuity with his previous corpuses, they evoke our evolution and our recent technological expressions. Unless it’s the evolution of technology and its human expressions. The exhibition questions: who really has control? We ? The machine ? Nature, which encompasses everything?

To immerse yourself in Baier’s approach, the best way is to start by watching his 42-minute video. The digital film, which required a crazy investment, has a crazy aesthetic! The artist takes us into a world that is both familiar and surreal. With images of architectural constructions, skillful games of reflection and atmospheres that keep you in suspense. A video that combines the transparency of glass and that of water, the brilliance of aluminum and the green tones of forests. The soundtrack conveys industrial and natural noises. Clicks, rumbles of thunder, bubbling, chirping of birds. A work that we would like a museum to acquire so that it can be shared by as many people as possible.

After viewing, return to the entrance. By examining each creation, one after the other, closely, we can see Nicolas Baier’s ability to generate beauty, significance and the strange. Real or unreal? we ask ourselves in front of the executives. At Baier, real and unreal are inextricable, just like in our lives now.

One of the most fascinating works is an iris titled Volcano. Both painting and large-format sculpture, Volcano stems from a 3D digital drawing followed by numerical control (CNC) cutting, several layers of paint and then resin, the shaping of a convex shape and a return to the CNC technique. “A tentative work on the gaze, perhaps our most noble activity, says the artist. The day I finished it, Michael Snow died, he who had taken photographs of his iris and that of his wife…”

Some achievements evoke expressionism. The artist thus drew for weeks on his computer to produce chiaroscuro. A delicate landscape and a deceptively peaceful atmosphere. Like the artist.

In the small room of the gallery, the series Replication suggests that after thehomo faber (“the industrious man”), theHomo informaticus has only applied what nature has done since the origin of life. The images from an X-rayed computer – “contaminated” by the 3D modeling of a single-celled blob – are telling. Nature expresses itself despite us, despite everything. Replication recommends a little humility…

In the last room, we recognize the designs that led to the video. They too reveal elements of the artist’s studio. In these digital paintings, the staging is chaotic. The professional office is invaded by an intrusive nature. But Nicolas Baier hates the expression “nature takes back its rights”. “Nature never lost them,” he says. This work is about cohabitation. »

When we become aware of the work required by this nourishing and varied production, but also when we delight in the thoughts it generates about our relationship with technology and nature, we are flabbergasted. Simultaneously digital architect, sculptor, draftsman, painter and photographer, Nicolas Baier is a complete artist who deserves greater visibility, he who has not had a museum solo in Quebec for 13 years. Neglecting excellence is like burying gold, right? Let’s wish him a bright tomorrow.

Communicating vesselsby Nicolas Baier, at the Blouin Division gallery, until March 11