Reviews: Christian Messier & Syrine Daigneault at Loulou; Véronique Buist & Christelle Lacombe at COA

Espace Loulou is a small space at the north end of Saint Laurent that you reach in a brown elevator. It is currently hosting the show Le Jour Défait, by two artists I have discussed previously, Christian Messier and Syrine Daigneault. Made up of a small set of paintings, they are woven together through a set of recurrent referents (match held by hand, volcanoes) and more elaborate tableaux. The show is given a certain unity thanks to these recurrences and to the styles of the two painters which, while distinct, do not abrasively rub against one another but work in a complementary way.

According to the exhibition statement:

Syrine draws her inspiration from the contingency of social norms and the construction of reality. Her paintings visually capture the tension between individual consciousness and learned social behaviour. This sharp perception, exacerbated by the derealization she experiences, translates into an exploration of the vital force that emanates from this lucidity. However, the distance and anxiety induced by derealization can also lead to maladaptive behaviours, reflecting the inner struggle and challenges associated with this experience. [p] Christian, for his part, draws on Bergson's essay on laughter and Freud's concept of the uncanny to create disturbing scenes in which the comic is undone by too great a loss of contact with reality, making us oscillate between laughter and dread. He also experiments with AI to generate realistic representations of human beings that nonetheless ooze artificiality and undermine our familiar relationship with others. [p] By combining our distinct approaches and exploring these complex concepts through painting, we present a body of work that invites the viewer to live with us in our undone space.

So both sets of works are basically about gaps in perception and what happens when they are tripped over, they are about how gaps are surfaces. There are some important distinctions to be drawn here. Daigneault’s work does not show any of the things she indicates. The text does not merely supplement in this respect but domesticates the image to the level of illustration. Everything is psychologized or sociologized by textualization (it is absent in the image) and rendered in fairly blatant symbolic form (vital force as volcano). In fact, the central self-portrait in which she depicts herself surrounded by images of volcanoes is so over the top it borders on self-satirizing (something also suggested by its title) which does not suggest “inner struggle” so much as the “lucid” recognition of its irreality to the point that the effect is comic. This, quite effective comic quality is very different from that of the other painter.

Messier’s work is demonstrative. His pieces are worked up from AI-generated imagery. The results have a certain glitchy quality to them (especially in the depictions of hands) and feel slightly more humorous. Although his paintings, at least those I have seen over the past several years, tend to be acerbic and filled with references to found imagery that gives them a dislocated and uneven quality. This time they come off as more gelled. I don’t know if that is the effect of working with AI or just of changes in palette.

The central work from him is part awkward tourist group selfie, part vague horror. Its figures are contorted and seem to come from different realms that have been thrust together, the juxtaposition of the figures freezing them in distorted postures. Faces grimace to the point they seem on the verge of explosion and flesh ripples while clothing takes on impossible contours. 

It could be argued that AI-generated art is the logical inheritor of some of the avant-garde tendencies of the first half of the twentieth century, notably those that stressed automaticity. Unlike AI-generated texts which can closely approximate journalistic and academic discourses with equal or greater competency than many of the people in those fields, something odd tends to happen with text-to-image generation. Depending on the programme you use, and your dexterity at authoring prompts, you get radically different results in what is effectively the mechanical poetry of clichés. In part, obviously, this is a testament to the fact that the analogy between language and image was always erroneous.

I do not think that there is anything uncanny about the results here. They just look like paintings of AI-generated images, and in a sense that is more interesting. The uncanny relies on the holdover of subjective feelings to project onto something but working from AI is more of a demonstrative way to de-subjectify a subjective content, atomistically decompose and recompose it in ways that are autonomous from intent, and set it in a position of dictating model where the artist becomes a machine for the machine’s product. 

At galerie COA is a two-person show featuring the works of Véronique Buist and Christelle Lacombe. Like the two artists at Loulou, Buist’s work presents a form of catastrophe, here not volcanoes or the grotesqueries of AI but asteroids and meteors blasting matter apart in largely pastel hues of watercolour that describe their action in crude, broad gestures, presented in relatively intimate and small format. Lacombe, meanwhile, uses textiles to create work that resembles the largely illegible scrawling and symbolic doodles of a notebook. If the textiles in Buist seem like handicraft, the “scrawls” of Lacombe take on a slightly more industrial quality, turned through a sewing machine.

Lacombe’s play of swerving and drooping lines, of clumps of thread whose shape deforms what could have been its meaning basically ends up being asemic. In some of the works a few stranded words can be made out, but overwhelmingly the translation of the cursive into the sewn sutures the opening to significance. It is writing with its traditional communicative function removed. You end up with the irony that textiling is a form of stripping where writing becomes something that is seen rather than read and the seeing is a reduction of sense but gain in sensuality. This is one of the most basic functions of the asemic strategy.

However, in this instance, the transformation, or alienation from writing is taken even further. What the presence of Buist’s work makes clear is that this is matter of surface. It is a relief sculpture. It is distant from language because it is all rhythm and gesture, split from sound and the hum that provides the body, working on tactilitity in a totally different way.

In the case of Buist, it is the genre of the landscape sketch that is being re-worked, the addition of stitches into her patches of colour operating like bits of relief on a globe. This is a much less extreme use of stitching, one that sits quite comfortably within its genre as an effect. 

In Lacombe, something more seems to be at stake as the apparent notations of life are broken down from their initiating gesture. There is a range to this, starting from legible words, numbers, and familiar signs (all of which have no evident reference), to the collapse of sense and the retaining of “reference” (the image of a possible word) only as a tactile contour that has clearly been translated through a machine.