What connects these two shows, and I won’t labour the point, is writing. By coincidence, they fit intriguingly within the trend that seems to be going on with artists attempting to negotiate text in exhibitions. In the case of Didier Morelli, this seems very conscious, especially since it is as much a work of curation and ressentimentalization as anything else. In Louise Robert, text was an essential part of her practice and the attempt to think through its graphic possibilities was central.
Hommage à Louise Robert (1941-2022) at Galerie Simon Blais
Among the province’s Contemporary artists, Louise Robert has been written about more than most. Self-taught, her early work mimed Automatism until her graphism expanded to include what looks like writing, and sometimes is such, sometimes a title or allusion, sometimes just the appearance of writing.
While the place of writing in her work is the perennial issue that is taken up, it is usually in reference to écriture, whether understood in the terms of Derrida, Barthes, or Écriture féminine. Likewise, it is écriture posed within the history of abstract painting.
Influenced by Twombly, Beckett, Duras, and some of those associated with the nouveau roman, her works tend to start with text and build into painting. “Thus it is as if the work as a whole constituted an enormous artist’s book,” suggested Gilles Daigneault, “but an unbounded, non-linear, non-homogeneous book whose first pages have only the appearance of pages of writing.”
A majority of the works on display are from her 1975-80 period when she was doing a lot of “chalkboard” paintings where white scrawls appear on black acrylics. The larger works have this kind of prop illusion while the small are usually on kraftpaper and take on a very different quality, the sheen of the paper often shining through and allowing a unique tactile suggestiveness absent from the larger works. Some words are legible, banal, or mysterious, some scrawling seems asemic.
Probably the more glaring thing about the paintings in the show is the cutting and gouging present in some of the larger works, aspects which rarely translate to their reproduction and which give some of the paintings an entirely different nuance than the stress on writing tends to suggest. They go some way in moving her a little from the often overly literary way she tends to be addressed.
Combined with their prop quality, this gives them more of an object status, helping to de-stress their questionable legibility. There is a shift from the seemingly familiar image/relation, to the de-naturalization of this image, to a greater registration of its stranger qualities.
There are also some oil, pastel, and crayon pieces from 2021 which are better ignored and seem like a non-sequitur here, fulfilling the addendum function they were likely intended to have. As an exhibition, and as with most of the showings of historical works at Simon Blais, they tend to just be presented to stand more or less on their own rather than curated. That mostly succeeds here.
Didier Morelli’s La maison à jouer de S.L. at Centre des arts actuels Skol
The Robert show is one of historical materials, shown largely indifferently to this. The paintings are displayed as though they were done last week. By contrast, Historical (in the genre sense) shows like Sophie Jodoin’s current exhibition at Artexte or Morelli’s at Skol deal with these materials in a meta-historical way, supplementing them with layers of curation and turning them into something other than their ostensible object.
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In the case of Morelli, it
…is an immersive installation that revisits Suzanne Leblanc’s solo exhibition, La maison à penser de L.W, first presented at Skol in 1999. Since then, the work has been stored in his father, the artist François Morelli’s, studio. In March 2020, Didier moved back to live in this space that had been his childhood home… […] In her original 1999 installation, Leblanc created a series of 55 panels invested with prose, that expanded Ludwig Wittgenstein’s philosophy into a sensuous, reflective, and incantatory fiction. With each individual panel physically representing a different room of the house the famed philosopher designed for his sister Margaret, Leblanc built a new and portable architectural configuration.
A series of questions will be posed through Didier’s re-presentation of the installation. The artist aims to reconfigure and rethink the living, embodied archive which is housed in the studio where he now lives, by drawing into conversation the modular sculptural work by Leblanc, François, and his wife, Arièle Dionne-Krosnick. The private space of the studio is literally turned inside out, with Wittgenstein’s language-games serving as an entry point into a playful deconstruction of text, sculpture, childhood, architecture, and sport (soccer/football).
If a “conversation” is an exchange of views, what is offered by Morelli in the exhibition could be more accurately termed a change of views. It’s like one of those historical novels written from the perspective of a famous figure’s anonymous scullery maid.
It lacks both Leblanc’s austerity and the philosopher’s often astonishing level of melodramatic strangeness. Wittgenstein’s tendency to speak in monologue, to throw fits, to stare morosely for hours in front of a crowd, or to shove ropes up his ass and pretend to be a monkey -- which places him far more in league with transgressive performance art or Dada than reading the record of his statements tends to suggest -- is nowhere to be seen in the pristine domiciling that he is accorded. Leblanc’s fictionalization of Wittgenstein removes all of this, adding a layer of quasi-sentimental biographing onto the largely sterilized image of the philosopher that has been preserved by academics.
Leblanc’s domestic perspective is retained and exaggerated in an extreme way. Morelli's use of Leblanc’s work doesn’t just make them more sculptural, it also makes them more bookish than they ever seemed as posted texts where they functioned, quite successfully, as suspended images. Here they have the quality of curated things.
The qualities that he imbues these things with are sometimes more sculpture than text and sometimes to re-think the graphic in sculptural terms. The inclusion of “football” etc. is as much (or more) a matter of assimilating another series of graphics to jar with the rival series as they are a means of indexing an “embodied archive.”
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Reflecting on Leblanc’s architectural references, the work in the show uses various pieces of housing framing and materials, laying them out on the floor like the ruins of some society. The nicest touch in the whole thing comes from a fan blowing on the torn open paper wrapping still swaddling a large text piece, the sound ruffling and undulating.
The irony in all this is that the act of curation is dramatized as a form of ruination, albeit ruination by sentiment and ruination in the sense of undoing, or loosening. It is no longer something to be read so much as stumbled through and gawked at as though the return of the artwork to the space of the gallery was a natural disaster.
One could cite one of Leblanc’s citations of Wittgenstein: “I am not interested in constructing a building, so much as in having a perspicuous view of the foundations of possible buildings.” While this intention persisted in Leblanc, in Morelli the results are not the foundations, but the hoarded detritus that is left when the foundations are gone.
If the end result is a kind of joke, it is not entirely clear what the joke is. For Wittgenstein, “clarity, perspicuity are valuable in themselves” and not a means to an end.
The most interesting thing about it is its sense of humour and, to a lesser degree, the sort of things that Wittgenstein had such a hard time dealing with, and readers of Wittgenstein have an even harder time dealing with. Though no scholar I know would admit it, the point of Wittgenstein’s philosophy was best distilled in his trying to come to grips with why it is hilarious to see a woman crouching on a plate of milk.