Cérémonie

Gallery II

When visitors enter Gallery II at CIRCA Art Actuel, they experience both familiar and strange feelings. They recognize the forms before them and yet they cannot quite understand what has happened in this place.

Celebrating the ambiguity between the organic and the mineral, Xavier Orssaud has conceived of a series of works that create a place. And in this place, an event has unfolded. Ritual or ceremony? Whatever the case, this rite invites us to respect the ecological places we inhabit, to reflect on what has gone on before and on the renewal that will come afterwards.

In the middle of a floor strewn with pebbles and scattered objects, slender forms punctuate the installation. At first glance, there’s a raw aesthetic to what might resemble the remains of charred tree trunks, decimated by a devastating fire. At the same time, the earthy color of the columns evokes another universe, that of ruin. Some might easily suggest that these objects are reminiscent of buried treasures that were discovered by archaeologists, such as the mask at the foot of a column. With the presence of a loofah on the floor, the marine world is not far away either. Oyster-farming enthusiasts might also see in the columns the famous posts used to grow oysters and other shellfish. But no oysters or shellfish here!

If the work’s polysemy doesn’t go unnoticed, what do these worlds have in common? I see in them a reference to the end: that of a time, an era, a state that must necessarily come to an end to make way for renewal. So, this end is not morbid; rather, it’s regenerative. It acts as a liminal space, a tipping point where awe and respect mingle. There is something sacred about it, which the artist deliberately dissociates from its religious or mystical straitjacket. A solemnity emerges from the whole and calls for ceremony.

Echoing the ceremonial, the artist takes up the codes of music through the arrangement of instruments placed here and there. The ceramic columns, pierced by openings adorned in white, undeniably evoke wind instruments that act as clues and markers of ritual. Here stands a flute, there a trumpet. On the ground, a saxophone-like shape confirms the reading. In this ceremonial forest, each column bears witness to its similarity and, at the same time, to its singularity, thanks to the plastic treatment of its forms. There is a striking contrast between the crude qualities of the central forms and their refined upper parts. Does the roughness evoke the material essence of all things, like the golem which, made of clay, refers to the embryo, or the unfinished? Do the distinctly shaped, smooth, iridescent ends, derived from castings of decanter plugs, characterize difference and singularity? The strength of the collective lies in the singularity of its voices, highlighting human intervention in nature. It is in this liminal space that Xavier Orssaud reverses or shifts the narrative of the environmental crisis to play on the porous boundaries between the aesthetics of a foretold disaster and a hoped-for renewal.

Text by Émilie Granjon

Authors Bio 

Émilie Granjon holds a DESS in Cultural Organization Management from HEC Montréal, which she obtained in 2015, and has been running the CIRCA Art Actuel artist-run center since May 2016. She is also an essayist and art critic, as well as an independent curator. With a PhD in semiology from UQAM in 2008, she analyzes the cultural issues of current art through the study of unusual figures. In her thesis, she focused on the semiogenesis of alchemical symbolism in Atalanta fugiens (1617), and published Comprendre la symbolique alchimique (PUL: Québec, 2012). In contemporary art, she co-authored with Fabienne Claire Caland Cinq fabricants d’univers dans l’art actuel (Nota Bene: Montréal, 2017) and, more recently, also with Véronique La Perrière M. Le miroir, la métaphore et le temps inversé (Sagamie: Alma, 2020).

Artists Bio 

Xavier Orssaud puts into images and space the current issues raised by the environmental crisis and the socio-cultural upheavals it engenders. He is a graduate of Université Paris 1 and École nationale supérieure d’arts de Paris-Cergy. His work has been shown in solo and group exhibitions in France and Canada, notably at the Galerie de l’Atelier Circulaire and the Centre culturel Georges-Vanier, in Montreal in 2023, at the Biennale Internationale d’estampe contemporaine de Trois-Rivières, in 2021, and at the Salon de Céramique contemporaine C14 in Paris, in 2023. His projects received support from CALQ twice in 2019 and 2021, and from CAC in 2023. In 2021, he won the first edition of the CIRCA-Silex residency program. In summer 2023, he took part in a three-month residency at the European Ceramic Work Centre (EKWC), a prestigious center dedicated to contemporary ceramics in the Netherlands.

Acknowledgements

Xavier Orssaud would like to thank the wonderful team at the European Ceramic Work Centre in Oisterwijk, the Netherlands, where he was able to work during a three-month residency on the creation of the installation in the show. He would also like to thank the artists Anina Major and Daniel Mullen, whom he met on site, for their good humor and unfailing support, as well as Elise Hart, Brian Anderson, Jaclyn Mednicov, Ranti Bam, Madeleine Child, including the curator Xenia Tsompanidou and the SEA Foundation.

The artist would especially like to thank the Canada Council for the Arts for its financial support, without which this project would never have seen the light of day, and CIRCA art actuel for the tremendous exhibition opportunity. Thank you to Émilie Granjon for the pertinent text accompanying this exhibition.

Last but not least, a special thought to Cassandre Boucher and her family.

Video credit: Noémie da Silva

Promotional photo credit: René van der Hulst

Photo credit: Jean-Michael Seminaro