La conjugaison des pensées complexes

The combination of complex thoughts

and Requiem from and with Anne Thériault and Virginie Reid.
Clothing : Hannah Isolde. Artistic consultant : Rosie Contant.

To register for the performances of Requiem:

 https://lepointdevente.com/billets/requiem

(What Nowhere Knows). Louis Bouvier’s work, The combination of complex thoughts, has the feel of a Victorian romance.

Bouvier’s studio is located in the former parish hall of St. Mary’s Anglican Church in Hochelaga, which burned down in 1923. The ghost of this English church, far away in the French-speaking east end of Montreal, must have exerted an excessive pressure on my imagination. When I visited Louis’ studio, the works in progress immediately brought me back to my reading of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, published in 1872.

Erewhon is, isn’t it, the flip side of Nowhere. A conjectural country, forgotten at the antipodes, in a fold of New Zealand or Australia. The kind of place, which before the advent of the Global Positioning System, could quietly continue to thrive with the benefit of the doubt, and where the ruins continue to elude aerial survey. In my imaginary travel memories––which, I must say, are a few decades old––singing sculptures guarded the entrance to Nowhere country. Tall stone pylons, pierced like flutes, where the wind modulated a ghostly melody. I went back to the book, just to verify this image. Butler assures us that the song of the statues takes up an air of Handel, and goes as far as providing a score. The pylons, which I had eroded to the point of abstraction, are atavistic idols, stone monsters, survivors of some obscure anthropology, predating the non-existence of Erewhon by millennia.

Bouvier had explained to me that he was building theremin-sculptures, which would have electromagnetic fields to match those of the visitors. Instruments that would play on the simple presence of humans, just as they would invite the mastery of passing virtuosos. At the time of my visit, the four sculptures, still waiting for their final stage of ornamentation, were nevertheless functional. The unfinished wooden armatures showed the electronic components that would transform them into conducting bodies. These appendages had appeared thanks to Léandre Bourgeois, an electronic engineer. And a little before my departure, I even was present for a demonstration of the musical soul of the device that the officiant choreographers Anne Thériault and Virginie Reid gave.

Bouvier has his office and machines upstairs. The tables and walls were cluttered with papers and books, miniatures and trinkets, scattered around the computer station. He explained to me that he was still determining the texture of the sculptures, and the objects he intended to attach to them. His formal vocabulary, with its playful assemblages, borrowing from archaeology and the decorative arts, enabled me to imagine the final look. I was happy to sketch mental images, with the assurance of being wrong, a bit like the first fossil hunters, who made it possible for us to meet dinosaurs, while misunderstanding the colour of their skin, details of their teeth and of their plumage… Such drifts prove that images continue to evolve without our knowing in the breeding ground of memory. And that the work of the imagination, like that of life itself, obeys a fertile inertia, which asserts itself from within.

An obvious connection can be made between Bouvier’s method and the techniques that make it possible to guess, from a piece of bone or a fragment of pottery, the negative portrait of extinct animals or civilizations. But where scientists try to recompose a lost image, Bouvier wants to create a new one, one that avoids the accepted pattern. I cannot help but detect, in this type of approach, the spectre of language. Paleontologists and archaeologists are engaged in a work of stripping away the geological strata, in search of footnotes that the living may have inscribed there. The fragments spread out on tarpaulins, on trestle tables, are like so many signs to classify. These invite the scientists to a complex conjugation exercise in which they try to finish the incomplete sentences of matter. Bouvier’s sculptures are not just rebus to be deciphered (nor, for that matter, are the lost bodies of the living). A principle of incompleteness remains at work, nourishing the assurance that no discourse can exhaust the richness of thought.

Since the beginning, Bouvier has practiced a lateral anthropology, cultivating improbable connections, multiplying horizontal relationships between seemingly foreign objects, both in their function and in their pedigree. He builds mobiles, in which asynchronous references momentarily combine to express the idea of something else: the traces of an elsewhere, always deferred and access forever forbidden, remains no less titillating. These composed objects, and dialogue between them, do not cease to remind us that they belong to a real time, a living reality, as difficult as they are to locate. They let us guess what nowhere knows, and that only time allows us to glimpse.

Like the archaeologists who arrive first, there is a little banditry in Bouvier’s attitude. But his looting is much more harmless. It is as if he had burst into the laboratory before the technicians had finished analyzing the artefacts, seizing them, out of pure enthusiasm, to take back to his workshop, where he produces working copies, before quietly returning them back to their place, without the borrowing making anyone feel wronged. In the studio, he has all the time in the world to give in to fascination, and to make, with the help of a 3D printer or other molding techniques, models to manipulate. He then begins to reproduce them, drawing or sculpting them by hand, unfaithful copies, having contours, materials, textures that evolve tentatively. Things change in size, colour or shape, but continue to look the same. One could name these incongruous doppelgangers fake artefacts to distinguish them from the original artefacts, which after having been freed momentarily from their servitude, have returned to the dormant state of facts.

This method is applied at every level. Bouvier starts by imagining the shape of an object. What is drawn on paper, or on screen, can eventually unfold in space, and become sculpture. He initially sketches a line, an outline from intuition, then he looks for the point of support, the base that will enable the object to stand. This one, while becoming sculpture, starts to suggest relationships, possible grafts.

 To escape from structural inertia and become something, this is the dream of all matter. In his gestures, Bouvier looks for a way to link fragments, to create poetic combinations. The artefact is transformed. The copy gives way to variations. The schema crumbles. For Bouvier, the fragment is not the trace of a lost totality to be rebuilt, but an entity that starts to shine with its own light, claiming its place in the heart of a mobile, however evasive it is. An object becomes another, endowed with a body, having dissimilar intentions. One thing calls for another. The sculpture becomes the host for distant music, which brings us back to a lost country.

— Daniel Canty

Bio of the author

Daniel Canty is a writer. Since the end of the 20th century, he has been developing a body of work in which writing lends itself to all kinds of metamorphoses: scriptwriting and directing, dramaturgy, and the creation of books, interfaces, installations, exhibitions, and itineraries.

His latest book, Sept proses sur la poésie (Estuaire, 2021), in which he attempts to demonstrate that “Poetry is, sometimes, a quality of light,” was a finalist for the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal. It follows La société des grands fonds (La Peuplade, 2018), an exploration of the floating relationship between literature, water and time, which was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award of Canada and the Grand Prix du livre de Montréal.

     He is also the author of Mappemonde (Le Noroît, 2015), Les États-Unis du vent (La Peuplade, 2014), Wigrum (La Peuplade, 2011), and the serial Costumes nationaux (costumesnationaux.com) and a series of “self-science-fictions” presented in various current art contexts. He directed the book production of VVV (le passage, 2015), the geopoetic atlas of his transborder odysseys with artist Patrick Beaulieu, and the trilogy La table des matières (Le Quartanier, 2006-2009), among other works.

His recent projects include a poetic score for Keiko Devaux’s chamber opera, L’Écoute du perdu (2023) and the artist’s book L’île Emaü (2022), a long letter addressed to us by a future artificial intelligence. He has many projects. danielcanty.com

Bio of the artist

Louis Bouvier, who was born in Montreal where he lives and works, draws his inspiration from a multitude of sources such as history, archaeology and alternative movements and cultures. And he uses a great variety of materials, including plaster, wood, stone, bronze, ceramics, drawing and 3D printing in his installation work. In 2010, he began to exhibit his work professionally in Quebec, Canada, the United States and Europe. He also has participated in numerous international residencies at Banff Centre (Alberta), PILOTENKUECHE (Germany) and NARS Foundation (Brooklyn), and has received grants on several occasions from the le Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and from the Canada Council for the Arts. His work has been exhibited at the following artist-run centres: Centre Clark (Montreal), L’Écart (Rouyn-Noranda), Caravansérail (Rimouski), Galerie Sans Nom (Moncton), Maison des artistes francophones (Winnipeg) and now at CIRCA art actuel (Montreal). Bouvier holds a Master’s degree in Visual and Media Arts from UQAM.

Acknowledgements

First of all, thank you to Anne Thériault, without whom I would never have had the idea of integrating theremins into sculptures, and also for her moral support and her indispensable and significant presence at all levels of this project. Thank you for your sensitivity and your gentleness.

A huge thank you to Léandre Bourgeois, without whom I could not have created this work. He is the technician/magician/programmer/artist/super human/genius that I needed to help me produce my crazy ideas. Without him, the project would still be floating in the back of my mind.

A special thanks to Virginie Reid for her musical contribution, and for embarking on this project with her eyes closed and with a smile on her face.

Thanks to Daniel Canty for his pen, I feel privileged to be able to read a literary work, which takes shape from the very essence of my artwork.

Thank you to everyone at CIRCA art actuel for believing in this crazy project.

I would also like to thank the Conseil des arts du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts for their support.