Reviews: Jérôme Bouchard at Bellemare & Lambert; "Coup de Chaleur" at Nicolas Robert; Frédérique Ulman-Gagné at Simon Blais; Nadine Faraj at McBride Contemporain

 

This week we look at four shows that superficially seem distinct but which reveal a variety of strategies for dealing with clearly shared concerns about the relation between the artist and their space, the eroticism of spatial connections, and attempts (not all successful) to deal with these things in terms of visual effects.

Jérôme Bouchard’s ni flaques, ni boue at galeries Roger Bellemare et Christian Lambert was inspired by a construction site in a park outside of Paris. The artist tried to map the territory using a LiDAR capture device, which transmitted data of the space through light measurements. This data provides a record of the erosion of the space and its transformation through ecological wastage.

He explains that:

By manipulating the data, I sought to explore the limits of this technology to capture such ‘third nature’ composed of waste, muddy puddles, gravel and earth, and plants. Since the floods of 2021 which destroyed my workshop in Belgium, I have been haunted by images (or the absence of images) predicting and/or representing these complex phenomena. In addition to the ecological questions that these phenomena imply, what particularly appeals to me are the places of change between figuration and abstraction. In the LiDAR survey of the Chanteraines’ park, I perceived an image generator whose content no longer had anything to do with my experience on the site or with the accuracy of the tool. Instead of trying to reproduce the images of the 3D visualization in painting, I was interested in capturing the gaps between my experience in the field and the data captured.

Effectively then, they are images about the gap between experiential perception and data which integrates the waste of the production process into the final image. Concretely indexing the real world, they produce a depersonalized and non-phenomenal capture of it. They are images of the absence of the subject in the work of art. Not only are these images of “third nature” but of the failure of various tools to chisel out a viable representation of it, leaving the end result as a kind of non-proximation of both the ephemeral object of the images and the tools that attempt to fix them. While the works are indexical, they also cast fundamental doubt on the index’s potential referentiality.

Unlike a lot of other recent work that has highlighted “science” (of various stripes) in a highly performative way as an integral feature of production and display, it mostly remains hidden here, only relayed by text, giving the results a quality different from the demonstrative that is more commonplace to such experiments. It is not the clarity of the experiment but the noise that it generates that he’s leaning into. The strongest feature of Bouchard’s work is less the conceptual relation to display than the immediately provocative (perceptually speaking) quality of the images he has generated. On their own, they are visually effective and stimulating in the way that the best op art, minus the drawbacks of op art, which tend toward the gimmick. Each piece hanging on the wall provides a discrete and remarkably successful simulation of the paradoxical experience of the collapse of reference through its mediation. 

The group show Coup de Chaleur at Nicolas Robert, featuring works by Frances Adair McKenzie, Alexa Laferté Coutu, and Jérôme Nadeau, shares a topical commonality with Bouchard’s show. Positioning itself in less precise terms, it also focuses on what amounts to a kind of “third nature.”

The exhibition explores through converging approaches how bodies, whether human, architectural, or technological, reinvent and respond to each other. […] Rather than presenting a linear or univocal discourse, the artists engage the remnants of vision, an excavation of the layers of meaning that compose our relationship with the world. The malleability of materials and technologies becomes an instrument of revelation, capturing the tensions of time and its traces. The works emerge as fragments; specters that do not simply want to be seen but demand to be unfolded, read as signs of a reality in perpetual mutation.

The works presented by the three artists are distinct in terms of how this is rendered. McKenzie’s works sit on the floor, clustered in the same area. Coutu’s span the walls at regular intervals and are interrupted by Nadeau’s. The latter appears like a flatter and reduced version of some of the basic visual effects accomplished by Bouchard.

Sculptural wall pieces, Coutu’s work is mostly made of glass and sand. They simultaneously have the appearance of shards that have been wrenched away from old buildings or gathered from an explosion site and something suggesting the broad outlines of torsos. Their surfaces have a flat, glowing quality and they sit on the walls like vertical puddles. In lighting effects, they have the quality of a cheap inflated fake jewel, void of any glittering or reflective potency.

McKenzie continues with her hybridized figures in glass mesh wire and various other materials. These perch on flattened plinths or stand erect and disembowelled; barely torsos, more sludge figures that are part body and part architectural elements.

The overall framing relies on the common appeal to dynamic change (we saw a nearly identical one last week), to an image of the world as flux and continual becoming, as though all of the fragments in the world were only its “unfolding.” The artist is a lab-worker and their work is the representation of this atomistic world, rendering in a quasi-figurative form the representation of processes, natural or otherwise. But beyond this vague and over-familiar Stoicism, it is art-as-illustration and an appeal to the pedagogical value of representation.

If Bouchard exploited various scientific means to chart out the collapse of this possibility and rendered it in a visual language that highlighted this, this trio doesn’t dramatize the process so much as the end product, which is more sleek than noisy. If he provided succinct and condensed spectacles, the theatricality at Nicolas Robert is more diffused and the appeal to “narratives” (whatever that means here) provided in the supplementary framing materials makes one wonder what these props moored away from any discernible narrative are doing. 

The middle gallery in Simon Blais is currently housing Frédérique Ulman-Gagné’s Ces murs qui protègent, which the broader accompanying text also casts in terms of “narrative.” In this instance, it’s largely autobiographical and like Bouchard, involves a sense of the loss of their studio space. If that resulted in depersonalization through convoluted technical means for him, in her case it becomes more about revisiting the objects of the eroding space.

Under the latent threat of losing the workspace she has occupied for twelve years, Ulman-Gagné has, over the past year, revisited old works. Stored in her studio, these pieces now embrace its architecture, light, and shadows. With introspective mise-en-abyme, the artist integrates the space into the artwork, blending the spiritual with the pictorial.

Although sometimes abstract, her set of paintings still feel nestled into everyday life and share the most with still lives. There is a strong sense of lived-in space to them that probably comes from her clear borrowing from the language of painting isolated (particularly domestic) objects that frequently surfaces whether or not the image is more or less objective. What seems to set her apart from others who mine a similar territory is the deliberately carnivalesque aspect that she injects into a lot of her work. This complicates the energy and comes through in some of her colour choices, her spaces dominated by the undulation of marquees, tarps or tents. These visual ideas generally fall in the centre of her treatment of lines and folds which operate as the intersection of this highly externalized (carnival) language and the overly specific internal one that she attempts to filter through it.

Her work now seems more rhetorically involuted than when I first saw it years ago at Dominique Bouffard. This is more a matter of accumulated tics and their ironing out into consistency than anything else.This is part of why it has something bordering on a collage quality. Aside from a few pieces that stick to relatively conventional and successfully atmospheric “portraits” of textiles, the works feel less found than borrowed. The vaginal imagery so common for decades from biomorphic abstraction to Women’s Art; the various grids, tiles, and softened almost pastel tones that are common to the retro vaporwave-style painting that is all over the place now; the stress on presenting surfaces that are not entirely opaque or transparent but suggest a kind of Mylar quality and the superimposition of all of these things in still lives that look collaged.

It gets obvious in its vaginal symbolism, which ends up coming off as more humorous than anything else. This is mostly forgivable because the visual analogy to the folds that dominate her work ends up infusing her images with a more carnal quality than might have been self-evident. Like the show at Nicolas Robert, here the theme is also a desire for unique erotic interactions between architectural forms and the architecture of the body. If that show tended to result in puddles and sludge people, in Ulman-Gagné it is more elegant, more flat, more distant hallucination than the presence of skin. 

 

If Ulman-Gagné was a little clumsy but still managed to manoeuvre into interesting territory that mostly worked, the same can’t be said of Nadine Faraj’s Playing with Fire at McBride Contemporain. There are two parts to the show. One is a grid of compact watercolours and the other is an installation that contains more of such figurative work, here cast as though they are cave paintings (or something). More theatrical than typical for the space, it is pleasant enough in a “trashy,” not entirely thought-out way.

The ad patter reads:

In this exhibition, Faraj continues her extraordinary delving into an exuberant and emancipatory kind of visionary imagery, exploring themes such as mortality and renewal, our primal human incandescence. This profound point of view, or revelation, is accomplished through Faraj’s consummate skill in watercolour technique, both materially and spectrally. Her colour palette retains and expands its repertoire of mesmerizing accents and effects, in particular giving warmth and breath to her celebration of Queer people, femininity and inclusive feminism, and the strength and resilience of marginalized peoples, in all times and places.

When entering the space, the large, dark, cobbled-together exterior of the structure that makes up most of the exhibition is immediately striking and disorienting. The exposed ties to the ceiling that keep it up add a moderate amount of visual tension. Once you walk nearly to the back of the gallery space, you can pick up a little flashlight and enter the structure. It looks very different inside than the social media pictures used here suggest. On its makeshift walls are various “cave” paintings of hermaphroditic and other vague and “monstrous” figures and skeletons which are here redeemed and re-branded as blandly recycled queer stereotypes. They are patched onto the thin walls and mostly worked out in a more rigid form than the splattered figures of the grid of watercolour works.

A thin or watered-down quality pervades the whole show. The cave isn’t a bad idea (although why a cave and why this blatant a form of particularly ahistorical fantasy colonizing art history?), it just isn’t pushed far enough for it not to feel like a clunky gimmick, especially given the type of generic space that it is presented in. It isn’t immersive enough to work, doesn’t engage with the senses in any thoughtful way, or exploit the values of darkness and directed light in a way that’s effective (even a closing flap would have been an improvement). Far more than with Ulman-Gagné, most of the iconography is predictably second-hand but feels even less lived-in and worked out. It comes off as far more trite and relies on an easy utopianism that, combined with its poor strategies of display, suggests a puritanical horror of the erotic and its repression into a market-friendly identity.