Review: Jérôme Fortin’s Dance: choreographic variations for the eye at Galerie Pierre-François Ouellette art contemporain | À Corps perdu/Sharing Madness at Galerie UQAM
One series (Danser) is more interesting as a concept, the evidence of which you are left with, while the other (Lignes) is more visually stimulating.
Composed of 50 pieces, for Danser Fortin folded, unfolded, and refolded strips of paper before printing them on sheets of paper so that only their reliefs remained. The results are mildly decorative, with a loosely elliptical quality and, if one wished to playfully extrapolate, are suggestive of the muddled foot moves of an old dance instruction manual.
As to their tactility, it is slight, and as a whole they register more as background noise than a set of images. Stretching them out along the wall as they are gives them some animation, but it’s a bit limpid.
Much more impressive is the shorter series of embossed, overlapping, or intersecting shapes, Lignes. All-white, they subtly change with the light, their shapes rising and falling as you pivot your body around them, altering perspective, or as the light in the gallery modifies.
It is a very slight trick, but it’s one that works well, providing impressively smooth micro-animations that invite a degree of participation in an appreciably non-annoying way.
These two series stand as a stark example of a far more thoughtful, subtle, and convincing integration of elements of dance into the very different space of the visual arts gallery than that undertaken by Galerie UQAM.
Their À Corps perdu | Sharing Madness curated by Florence-Agathe Dubé-Moreau and Maude Johnson, offers a fairly clunky set of dance videos under the vague pretext that they explore “the idea of moving together in a post-2020 context in which human relations have been challenged.”
It’s quite stodgy, but this has been the norm for most of the curatorial practice at UQAM, although it’s less unintentionally funny than usual. The whole thing has an almost oppressive level of phony sobriety, right down to the noxious vocoder that casts its tinkling presence beneath so much of it.
Although it is true that video installation can work wonders in representing and extending aspects of dance, this is certainly not the case here, where it tends to feel too much like documentation and is presented in a flat way that doesn’t render whatever abstract thematic content exists in the work to be any more clearly rendered or framed.