Art Reviews: Montreal, New York, Your Town.

Well, well, well...went to see the selection of paintings by Michel Boulanger at Musée D`Art Contemporain de Montreal. It`s hard for me to stress if I actually liked them or not, but I do find Michel Boulanger`s approach interesting. Describing his style is not an easy task: it`s an intriguing mixture emulating baroque painting masters, but portraiying a different self-mythology of surreal disneyesque characters in various poses, within floating neo-classical representations of ruins, all entwined at once to form what looks like complex terracota sculptures or pre-plannificatory-attraction-parc-painted-designs gone wrong. Cos even though the characters are often shaped in precise movements and activities (like searching for garbage food in "Vivre Aux Dépends Des Autres" (2002)), they`re all painted in the same ocre (meaning..they look like shit) of the surrounding architecture which they seem to emerge from, as if not filled with life but rather being sculptural fragments of ancient buildings remnants that had been destroyed (like gargoyles on a cathedral in ruins).

But that is what you decipher after a couple seconds, wandering your eyes as if through the mazes of an optical illusion painting from another era. Ultimately, these paints look abstract, and this constant going back and forth between abstract and sense is the principal effect that conveys the artist`s general thematic
about chaos and order, casting nitzchean moral problematics within the niche of eternity. While these paintings exceed time, they present a logic inherent of their own, what seems like the extravagant ruins of an impossible civilization of living toons. They also exceed the manifestation of dreams, they`re too well planified and composed. This is not exactly about indulging into someone else`s personal oniric motifs. The oniric aesthetic is a pretext to assembles a multitude of micro-situations into one canvase that supports a thematic that is usually socially charged, but also deals a lot with introspective personal psychology.

In "Vivre Aux Dépends Des Autres", characters of various sizes are shown in situations that depict through dramatic or comical scenes various ways that people may live through other people (garbage eating, domestic slavery, being madly in love, etc..). Again this is not exactly shown as a critic of the contemporary, but as a resume "portray" of general civilization, what I`m inducing from the intemporal aspect of having carved these characters within the surrounding architectural contours. Or maybe that was a warning about a society going toward ruin ? I prefer the solution that they represent the vestiges of a social conciousness, the materialization of what is already out there and cannot easily be altered.

"Mené Par Le Bout Du Nez" (leading by the tip of the nose) seems to be another expression about social manipulation and slavery, while "Rongé Par L`Angoisse Et Le Remord" and "Trainer Son Lourd Passé" (drawing your heavy past) are
moving deeper into absurd representations of psychological states.The latter shows these "terracottalike and plasterlike" fragments of characters cleaning up
the space, bringing boxes, riding tractors, or sleeping under the weight of books. The crocodile character that seems to command all this activity accentuates the impression that in Boulanger`s paintings we are always closer to hell than paradise.
"Rongé Par L`Angoisse Et Le Remord" is even sadder, with these characters holding their heads between their hands.

The 3 drawings part of this exhibit are even more ackward. They look like blueprints of possible paintings, except that it`s like the artist drawn all the contours and characters and than erased everything in order to keep the corners of each motif. Like in a dot by dot drawing fresh from beeing soluted, you can barely decipher what is going on but you can feel the "scene" emerging out of the abstract. Here also you start getting a sense of the artist`s methods. These blueprints are very complex and look intermittently like computer pixels: Boulanger works with 3d renditions of models before he starts to paint his sceneries. That could explain why he keeps within the similar monochromatic aspect of computer modelling: there`s no intention from him to hide the process, when his subjects apprehend how society has modellized itself through utter chaos.

Still the drawings are hermetics, or maybe I`m being lazy,
but I prefer when I`m able to see the exact picture that an
artist has in mind instead of being tricked at guessing it.
Ohhhhh... no, that is actually far from being true but this time
I will live with that impression that I rest frustrated.


The exhibit is still worth a visit (though it`s rather short...they are just 4 paintings!),
especially for the great animation piece called "After Monogram", which you won`t necessarely understand at first sight, but who cares about fiction when there is so little computer animation work that ventures in other realms than popular entertainment (well...actually..."we`re getting there"...last year I`ve seen a couple computer animations in museums including the great Murakami).

Let me put context and do the job the museum should have done for you:

Monogram is the famous work that Robert Rauschenberg created in the mid-50`s to separate himself from the Abstract movement. It`s a 3d mixte-media abstract canvase installed on the floor with a mountain stuffed sheep standing on it, a tire across its chess. You could see it as the expression of an artist trying to emerge from his belief that painting had become a conceptual cul-de-sac. That modern art history had made the rounds of what could be done with it (even tough this was going to be proven wrong soon enough, already with pop art that Rauschenberg himself lead to establish). Here are photos where you will observe that Michel Boulanger didn`t exactly replicated the original work as it was in his film (the sheep is not the same).

http://www.csulb.edu/~karenk/20thcwebsite/439mid/ah439mid-Full.00118.html

http://www.usc.edu/schools/annenberg/asc/projects/comm544/library/images/770.jpg

http://www.praemiumimperiale.org/eg/laureates/images/rausch_simage02.jpg

Metaphorically, Rauschenberg`s work have been adressed as being about artist`s life as a loner emprisoned within the specific artistic contexts of its time. Once you get that premiss, it`s pretty easy to infer meaning in the sheep of Boulanger that succeeds at liberating itself from both tire and canvase, only to find itself into a chaotic unstable world (a giant abstract inclined plane, partly designed by Francois Lacasse, if there was any artist whose work seemed more slippery) that will propulse it into an impossible suite of tumbles, until it reaches its uneffable original position.

I would argue Boulanger made this piece expressively for the museum: there has been various stances recently when artists use their chance at exhibiting in such institutions to better critic the art system (I`m thinking of Nicolas Baier and Sylvie Laliberté, at the same museum, amongst others). Judging from "After Monogram", which I absolutely adore for one very good reason, that it is a rare opportunity that an artist directly replies to another instead of vaguely referencing his work, Boulanger sees the world as dangerously chaotic and not open to much control, while art can serve as the necessary safeguard from falling amok, as long as it stays where it`s at and follow the rules.

Speaking of safeguards tires, another work recently that was written much about was the Jeff Koons design for the "GOAT" book published by Taschen (the biggest book published in the last century, a monographyon Muhammed Ali). But instead of depicting a goat, Koons chosed his emblematic inflatable dolphin, suspending in the air, emerging from above a stool encased with a safeguard tire. Koons`s hyper-realism once again proved to be powerfully optimistic, embracing the nietzchean ideal of freeing the übermensch.

http://www.gallerym.com/pixs/photogs/goat/selections/pages/Jeff%20Koons%20-%20Radial%20Champs.htm


Cheers,

Ced