Review: Antoine Larocque’s Acheter une maison, l’assurer et calicer le feu d’dans at Galerie Laroche|Joncas
Antoine Larocque’s Acheter une maison, l’assurer et calicer le feu d’dans at Galerie Laroche|Joncas is one of the more startling things I’ve seen in a Montréal gallery for some time. This is primarily down to how explicitly and aggressively Québécois it is, a trait that is increasingly rare in contemporary art in the province (not that it has been common since the 1970s).
Unsurprisingly then, the works displayed explicitly link to the province in the 1970s, to the October Crisis (Leur police attrapent un Chaoin radical) and up to the presence of Legault (François Legault), as well as the marginal lives of the rural populace.
More than these topical allusions, the works participate to some degree (conscious or not) with ti-pop, a tendency in Québec’s art that has been sadly ignored or badly understood by art historians. Larocque has associated his work with that of the poet Yves Boisvert, up to including his book La pensée niaiseuse ou les aventures du Compte d’Hydro by a graffiti-covered satellite dish (Call malade) and making an homage to him on a reclaimed quilt.
Larocque has been showing for several years using a variety of media. He’s made videos, books, and other things. In materials, here he relies on gnarled doors and wood, a rough collage of images taken from flyers and the Journal de Montréal among other sources, and a cumulative application of paint that is neither especially expressive nor interesting as painting. Where it becomes interesting is as a kind of backing to text which is given both a sense of urgent precision and a lack of any impressive degree of design.
When it works, it’s because it’s energetic (comic, perhaps angry) and the use of paint and colour schemes that look like they were cobbled together from the leftovers in someone’s garage give them a texture that seems lived in.
His texts work because they have this animating quality, which is guiding but never seems didactic, and which possesses an impressive use of the plastic value that text can provide.
It also recycles some of the basic iconography of ti-pop Québec: the trou de cul, the sarcastic use of the flag, suggestions of bestiality, and a concentration on the material properties of the province’s rural areas, their joual, and trash.
The image of Québec as a trash heap is distributed throughout but concentrated the most on a wall covered in texts, newspaper pages, found images, and garbage pasted together with green painter's tape. Unlike something like arte povera, where even trash tended to take on a luxurious and pristine quality, Larocque’s work has a lumbering and ambiguous vitality.
This aspect puts one in mind of Pierre Maheu’s claim regarding the artistic appropriation of Québec’s detritus, that, “[i]f it is only irony, demystification, distancing, it is only a vicious circle. The emancipated testifies to his origins and his specificity at the very moment when he thinks he is detaching himself from it.” [Pierre Maheu, “Patricia et ti-pop ou tu te sauveras pas de même baqua!” in Partis pris, vol. 5, no. 6 (March 1968), 54.]