Simple dreamers, the artists? Get that image out of your mind, because there are some who are very pragmatic, even more so than most of us. The exhibition Manholes locatedin Skol, brings together in any case five heads who have their feet firmly on the ground.
Since the fall, the broadcaster of the Belgo building, in downtown Montreal, has been advocating “a return to Earth”. Inaugurated in January, the third of the five exhibitions programmed under this title calls for us to no longer look at nature through the romantic lens and its idealistic world, nor through the magnifying glass of research and its objective distance. We need “a return to the concrete”, we say on the side of Skol.
“The idea behind the theme ‘return to Earth’ is to take our place. We have a certain place on Earth, not the whole place”, specifies Stéphanie Chabot. The director of the artists’ center insists that this “return” does not mean returning to the normality that is often talked about in times of pandemic.
The statement of the 2021-2022 program summarizes it as follows: “It is not a question of returning to the Earth as we imagine it or as we consume it, but of finding our dedicated habitat, its concrete surface, imprint of resources and beauty, but also of all our improbable interactions. »
These improbable interactions occur, in the January exhibition, through the gaze. It is a question of attitude, which was also defended in the fall of Momenta, the biennial of the image. To hope to save the planet, we must above all understand it and live there on a local scale, and not as a whole, as a whole. “Artists, says Stéphanie Chabot, circumvent the global vision of the world. They approach nature or the living in a way that goes beyond the usual dichotomy, [entre approches] scientific and romantic. »
Pulverize the atlases
Among the five artists of Regards locatedall relatively young (about fifteen years of practice at most), it is a question of intimacy, of experiences of a solitary landscape, but also of critical, even destructive gestures.
Feet on the ground, eyes towards the ground, Karine Locatelli draws in black ink not landscapes as far as the eye can see, but a nature rich in details and textures. In vertical format, the work An idea of the sea and the forest extends from the wall to the floor. Here, no horizon line, rather a space touched by the artist, trampled on, inhabited by his body.
The “idea” of nature, with Charlotte Guirestante Ghomeshi, goes through a photographic triptych that merges body and nature, while with Julie Roch-Cuerrier, it is expressed by questioning scientific authority. In three paintings of an abstract nature, she pulverizes an illustrious reference, an atlas. The pigments of the series Atlas Paintings come from this destruction. This representation of nature, more conceptual than literal, recalls, through its monochrome rendering, the very personal interpretation that Fernand Leduc made of natural light — his oils Winter skies in Chapala (2008).
The flagship work of the exhibition, by its scale and its temporal dimension, comes from an experience of the celestial vault to also be inscribed in the line of Leduc. Mosaic observe the skyor twenty-four circular drawings by Francys Chénier, stems from a program followed methodically, like a scientific protocol.
Every day, for an hour, never the same, the artist lay down on his back in the open air and reproduced in the studio what he had contemplated. The result, abstract and entirely subjective, not to say impregnated with physical experience, is not the translation of a simple detached observation. Meditation, sensations, affect are as good as mental perception.
Finally, by Pamela Breda, Landscape Becoming Landscape seems the sum of all other works. In this video which invades the exhibition hall and even overflows its walls – from the corridor of the Belgo leading to Skol, we hear the recording of a bird song -, the artist, born in Italy and resident of London and New York, walks in nature, observes it, takes care of it and leaves a bit of his own there.
Like Julie Roch-Cuerrier, she tackles consecrated representation by tearing out the pages of a book reproducing idyllic landscapes, pages that she then carefully places in the middle of nature. It is a restorative gesture, symbolic, certainly, but exemplary of this individual effort that we all have to make to “return to Earth”.