de fortune

OPENING: Thursday January 16, 5:30 pm

ABOUT THE EXHIBITION

With de fortune Michel Boulanger proposes a strange sculpture: a full-scale Westfalia built with driftwood. From the iconic 1967 model, he has retained only certain lines around the perimeter, creating a three-dimensional drawing in the space of CIRCA’s main gallery. Far from being straight and smooth, the driftwood creates twisting lines with much unevenness. The matte black paint that covers the wood softens the relief, as well as the fine white lines that run through it. The overall effect seems perhaps like a cage.

Boulanger has been using digital tools to explore drawing for many years. To better understand the conventions that guide this type of drawing, one should to refer to science fiction, which uses this as inspiration to create future worlds. In Star Trek, for example, a room consisting of a white grid on a black ground, the “Holodeck,” is employed to generate virtual worlds; and in the computer world of the film Tron, only the edges of objects are outlined with coloured lines. These examples identify the two essential elements for creating the effect of volume in a digital drawing: the grid – for the 3D effect of the environment – and the wireframe – to create the 3D effect of objects.

In his sculpture, Boulanger brilliantly hijacks these codes from the digital vocabulary and transposes them onto a real object. The overall effect creates polarizing visual tensions, between the materiality of the “hand-made” and the use of digital tools, which evoke the thin white lines reminiscent of the “wireframes.”

The idea for this project was conceived at the 2022 Baie-Saint-Paul Symposium. For this symposium, curator Anne Beauchemin invited the participating artists to reflect on the theme of “The Digital World in Question” for their work. Living near the Baie St Paul area, Boulanger developed a new mode of production, expanding his work method with the use of digital tools.

Thus, work began on de fortune when the artist created a digital drawing of a Westfalia. This sketch then served as a template and guide for his driftwood construction. For over a year and a half, the artist scoured the shores of the St Lawrence River – near the municipalities of Rivière-Ouelle and Berthier-sur-Mer – in search of pieces of beached wood compatible with the lines and curves of his initial drawing. In this project, the artist uses digital technology without the production means that machines offer. With rudimentary resources, he had to let go control over the perfect image. The white lines drawn in pencil, representing the idea of wire, become smudged as they are applied and irregularly mark the black surfaces. The material itself, the driftwood and its limitations, cause glitches when following the reference model with its perfect curves and straight lines.

Drawing inspiration from the landscape, Boulanger evokes this with his makeshift Westfalia. We find this in his choice of driftwood: weathered pieces of wood that surf has washed up on beaches, journeying into the heart of the elements. We also discover this in the symbolism of the camper van, which refers to the freedom that hippies idealized to explore the North American landscape.

As a counterpoint, the forced nomadism of people who lose their homes and live in their vehicles also influenced the artist. The narrative of Chloé Zhao’s film Nomadland (2020), particularly inspired him with its homeless characters living in their caravans. The shape of the Westfalia and its precarious construction recall the fragility, makeshift shelter and fallen dreams these people experience.

A work of multiple metaphors, for Boulanger de fortune is the materialization of an idea that still carries within it the notion of its original concept. I would add that today’s lifestyles – between the real and the virtual – lend a bitter-sweet note to this sculpture, which also conveys a kind of warning. In this sense, if we let our imagination run wild, we might think that this sculpture from a three-dimensional digital drawing has escaped from the screen in order to impose itself in the gallery space. Or worse, could it be the other way round? The gallery space, transformed into a virtual grid, a digital space, welcomes us in order to contemplate this 3D drawing?

-Text by Geneviève Goyer-Ouimette

Artist biography

Michel Boulanger is a visual artist who was born in Montmagny, and now lives and works in Montreal and L’Islet. He holds an MFA from the Université du Québec à Montréal, and was a professor there at the School of Visual and Media Arts from 2001 to 2020. While at UQAM, he co-founded the Grupmuv, a creative research laboratory for drawing and moving images. Michel Boulanger has shown his work in numerous exhibitions in Canada and abroad, as well as in national museums, such as the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. In 2004, a solo exhibition of his work was presented at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. His work also has been exhibited in several Quebec and Canadian artist-run centres, and can be found in many prestigious public and private collections.

Author biography

Geneviève Goyer-Ouimette is presently the Curator of the Collection d’œuvres d’art de la Ville de Laval. Previously, she was the curator of the Collection Prêt d’œuvres d’art at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Director of CIRCA art actuel and Curator of Contemporary Quebec and Canadian Art from 1945 to the present, and Gail and Stephen A. Jarislowsky Chair at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. Also as a curator, she has organized a number of exhibitions, and written about the work of Catherine Bolduc (Salle Alfred-Pellan and Expression) and Éric Ladouceur (Musée du Mac Lau and Galerie Graff), the first edition of Projet HoMa (Fondation Guido Molinari and Maison de la Culture Maisonneuve), Mnémosyne: quand l’art contemporain rencontre l’art du passé (MBAM) and four editions of Zoom Art, a project displaying contemporary art in publicity spaces of the Laval Subway Stations. As well as writing essays for catalogues and art magazines, she is involved in the art community as an active member of Est-Nord-Est résidence d’artiste in Saint-Jean-Port-Joli, an honorary member of CIRCA art actuel and sits on the steering committee of the Galerie de l’Université de Montréal. She holds degrees in art history (UQAM), museology (UQAM) and the management of cultural organizations (HEC Montréal).