The first solo exhibition of Jasmin Bilodeau, one of the members of the famous BGL triad, now dissociated, has been open to the public since Saturday, at Galerie 3, in Quebec. He exhibits alongside Laïla Mestari, a promising multidisciplinary artist who deals with her North African-Quebec family heritage.
“I’m feverish, like a student coming out of school,” said Jasmin Bilodeau at the opening of her exhibition. The artist was very happy to present certain works on which he had been working “for years”, but which his practice within BGL did not “allow him to develop, for lack of time”.
Formed in 1996 while the three artists (B, G and L) were studying at Laval University, the collective has become one of the most illustrious players in contemporary art in Canada, known for its grandiose installations, often critical of the consumer society.
With his new exhibition, titled Soft minimaldivided into three distinct corpuses, Jasmin Bilodeau notably takes up certain themes and materials previously associated with BGL, including wood, but in an eminently personal approach.
This is how he presents, in one of the rooms of the gallery, a set of paintings representing urban landscapes, exclusively made from small tree branches gleaned by the artist, then carefully repainted.
“We had started, with BGL, to conceptualize monumental works from branches, but I wanted to reclaim this approach to bring out the contrasts from my own observations of the cities represented”, maintains the artist.
The latter ostensibly evokes the opposition between the fragile and organic nature of branches and the industrial forms of urban landscapes, especially bridges and towers.
Soft and personal paintings
Although BGL is best known for its works of public art – sculptural – and its site-specific installations, such as the one presented at the 56e Venice Biennale, in 2015, Jasmin Bilodeau said “painting for several years”.
“Finally, I can present these paintings. I captured moments of pure happiness, where time stands still, while I was in communion with nature,” says the artist. He therefore also exhibits a series of paintings done in acrylic on raw canvas, all natural landscapes, in relatively small formats that evoke photos taken by a mobile phone.
The most interesting corpus of the entire exhibition remains the small sculptures, made from branches, alone, cast in bronze as is, then repainted. They appear there like ballerinas in motion, evoking all the intrinsic poetic potential of the elements of nature.
Multiple identity glued together
Also at Galerie 3, the artist Laïla Mestari unveils new works in drawings, photographs and textiles, at the end of a collaboration carried out within the framework of the Artroduction program, piloted by the gallery and intended for emerging artists.
Having grown up in a North African-Quebec family, the artist presents, among other things, magnificent pieces of textiles, such as collages of cultural references, recontextualized to evoke her multiple identity.
“I love representing the tension in my work, the tension between cultural origins, past and present, between materials,” says the artist. His works draw, among other things, from iconography and the Amazigh (Berber) archives of Morocco.