Le retrait is a recent video installation with sound by the artist Olivia Boudreau.

A young woman sitting in near-darkness in the middle of a large, undefined space plays J.S. Bach’s Erbarme Dich. Originally composed for voice, the piece is adapted here for oboe. During her performance, the musician periodically stops playing, as if interrupted, only to start again from the beginning. This process goes on for approximately fifty minutes.

Le retrait uses the static shot that characterized Olivia Boudreau’s video-based performance work over a ten-year period, beginning in 2004. La brèche (2012) and Femme allongée (2014) mark the introduction of editing and narrative into her work, that Boudreau continued to explore in her subsequent projects Il faut tomber (2016) and La chute (2017), where she integrated the use of dialogue as well. In this new composition, consisting of a single, unedited shot, Boudreau reconnects with a durational approach requiring sustained visual and auditory attention on the part of the viewer. The performer shares this demanding mode of engagement as she repeatedly stops and starts again. Successive attempts to play the piece, each slightly shorter than the one before (a few notes are dropped each time), accumulate in a substractive economy that evolves towards spareness.

The image in Le retrait is probed in an effort to identify performer and space that remain remote and anonymous in the semiobscurity. Simultaneously, the sorrowful notes played over and over again by the oboe imbues us with emotion. Affect and the construction (or deconstruction) of the visible are inextricably linked. In the video’s extended time, its density breached by abrupt suspensions, openings are formed through which subjectivity in all its variations can insinuate itself.

The Erbarme Dich is a lamentation for solo voice marked by the failure in a lapse of faith, and the sorrow that it incurs. The aria, taken from Johann Sebastian Bach’s Saint Matthew Passion, draws its inspiration from the biblical account of the apostle Peter’s Denial, where Jesus’s closest disciple thrice disowns him.

In 2014, the Gallery presented Oscillations of the visible. Olivia Boudreau. The exhibition brought together works realized by the artist between 2004 and 2014.

The artist would like to thank Le conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, Montréal Grandé Camera, Micro-scope and Projet 1606 de Saint-Adrien.