Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist
Courtesy of the artist.
Courtesy of the artist.
The brainchild of artist/curator Mathieu Beauséjour, this project brings together artists Alain Benoit, Louis Fortier, Myriam Laplante and Claude Perreault. It constitutes an attack upon received ideas, as well being as a concrete rendering of the idea of the “head in the belly.” The exposition plunges viewers into the world of the carnival and the grotesque, where excess and the overturning of social roles occupy their rightful place.
CURATOR’S COMMENTS
La tête au ventre is, therefore, an occasion for celebrating, but in something of a haphazard and chaotic manner under the tutelage of sharp wit and eccentric musings. It is also a celebration of our flesh – our very meat and marrow – where we pitch our tent among works of art, look at them eye to eye and recognize ourselves in them. By bringing our mind down to the level of our gut and laughing, not at it but with it, I want to bring out the profoundly carnal element of our relationships with others. The exhibition features bodies as fleshy envelopes that rib and mimic one another, that disguise themselves so that they flower into living embodiments of attitudes, of ways of thinking about and making art that proceed by way of pleasure toward a materialization that leads toward the body, the earth and laughter. Send in the clowns!
– Mathieu Beauséjour, Curator.
Curator: Mathieu Beauséjour
A production of the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery
The Artists
Interested, from the outset of his career as an artist, in the Rabelaisian themes of carnival, excess and the grotesque, Alain Benoit has over the past five years developed a body of work centered around the body of an obese model named Louis Cormier. Working with this Pantagruel-like model, the artist has set out to call the tradition of monumental statuary into question while probing the concepts of standards, rules, good manners and the social order. The irreverent character of his sculptures, videos and installations generates a feeling of ambivalence in viewers, who find themselves at the juncture between the tragic and the burlesque. Alain Benoit lives in Montréal.
THE WORKS
Étalon, 2003.
A sculpture depicting a naked obese man, Étalon is made from black urethane, which absorbs light and gives the work a mute presence and a weight corresponding to the model’s copious flesh and disproportions. The work’s title refers to the standard for the sculpture of antiquity, which Benoit is recasting in terms of new criteria.
Pâte-molle 2 / sculpture hippothétique, 2005.
Pâte-molle 2 / sculpture hippothétique is a video loop that makes use of digital modeling. It shows the male model from Étalon down on all fours mimicking the movements of a galloping horse. According to the artist, this strange amalgam of man and horse is a contemporary version of traditional equestrian sculpture.
What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?, 2001.
In this small room with walls covered with distorting mirrors (like those found at country fairs), viewers come face to face with deformed images of their bodies, with modifications that break down and multiply their being and their very identity.
EXPLORE
- Relationships with the body, flesh and the senses
- The concepts of excess, disproportion, immoderation and density
- The obese man as the personification and glorification of the theme of the grotesque
- A parody of the canons of traditional sculpture
A FEW QUESTIONS
- How do Alain Benoit’s works take us back to our corporeal nature? How do they make us aware of our body?
- Alain Benoit’s works often plunge us into a state somewhere between the funny and the disturbing, in the process generating uneasy laughter. Why? What do you think produces this effect?
- The installation, What’s the Ugliest Part of Your Body?, gives viewers an active role that goes beyond visual, intellectual or emotional engagement with it. They also have to explore it in a physical manner. How does this physical engagement with the work affect the way we perceive it?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Beauséjour, Mathieu, ed. La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
Molin-Vasseur, Annie. “Proximité obligatoire (entretien avec Alain Benoit).” ETC Montréal (June 2003): 23-28.
Alain Benoit. L’antihéros charnel contre les héros acharnés (prise 2). Thiers: Le Creux de l’enfer, 2002.
Bouglé, Frédéric. “L’antihéros charnel contre le héros acharné. De l’utopique au grotesque (entretien avec Alain Benoit).” Art présence, no. 28 (1998): 2-27
Oriented mainly toward sculpture, Louis Fortier has devoted the past decade to his favourite motif: the head. His tireless and prolific multiplication, accumulation and repetition of this anatomical fragment reveals the obsessional character and excessiveness of his art. His numerous wax or plaster heads (made using his own as a model) are manipulated, deformed and kneaded to form the shapes they take on in their final manifestations. Raising questions that have to do with identity, genetic manipulation and cloning, Fortier’s works also serve as temporal metaphors that speak to us about the artist’s work in the studio, the handling of matter and its possible accidents.
THE WORKS
Déroutes quotidiennes (programme long, dit de la reconstruction)
Avatars, angles, moules et fuites, 2007.
The installation Déroute quotidienne brings together about 200 anatomical fragments cast in wax and plaster from the artist’s own head. Some pieces are placed in small groups on the surrounding walls while others are placed on a tiered platform. This sculptural ensemble contains a variety of biomorphic forms rendered in an illusionist mode ranging from the monstrous, to the caricature and the shapeless. The lay out of these pieces offers various points of views on the distorsions to which the artist has subjected the casting of his own head.
La répétition (Chant des possibles : mars 2005, août 2006, mai 2007, janvier 2008…), 2005.
Conceived as a calendar, La répétition assembles 31 heads in microcrystalline wax each placed in numbered compartment. Each head presents a different facial expression captured on a daily basis thus creating an inventory of various possible facial physionomies.
La correction. Une méthode pour saisir une notion d’éternité en vingt secondes, 2005.
La correction presents a series of 20 heads in profile in microcrystalline wax. Displayed in a line in the Gallery’s front vitrine, these faces explore the elusive nature of identity and alterity.
EXPLORE
- The coexistence of fascination and repulsion, of the beautiful and the abject.
- Numerous variations on a single motif.
- The concepts of quantity, abundance, reduction, manipulation, modelling and cloning.
- The concepts of chance and unpredictability.
- The malleability of matter. The organic and fleshy quality of wax.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- Louis Fortier’s heads are made from wax. In your opinion, would the installation produce the same effect if they were made out of plaster, marble or bronze? How does the raw material used by the artist shape our experience of the work?
- While the motif of the head is traditionally associated with reason and the intellect, Louis Fortier’s sculptures appeal more to the senses and come across primarily as metonymic representations of the body. Why?
- Does the fact that all of Louis Fortier’s sculptures originate with the modelling of the artist’s head change your interpretation of the work? In your opinion, what questions does this feature raise?
A FEW QUESTIONS
Beauséjour, Mathieu, ed. La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
Latendresse, Sylvain. “Louis Fortier, artiste polycéphale,” ETC Montréal, no. 54 (Summer 2001): 57-60.
Pelletier, Sonia, “L’intensité du même,” Louis Fortier. Transfert interrompu! Longueuil: Plein Sud, 2001.
Cormier, François, “Clones (entretien avec Louis Fortier).” Cahier de la Galerie B-312, no. 36, 1999.
Gilbert, Jean-Pierre. “Se faire une tête, essai de génétique appliquée.” Bulletin de la Chambre Blanche, no. 23 (Fall 1999): 37-38.
Myriam Laplante is a multidisciplinary artist who creates, with a certain degree of cynicism, works imbued with an element of the fantastic that parody the world of fairytales, carnivals, country fairs and circuses. Her installations, photographs and objects draw a scathing portrait of daily reality, using a fanciful and imaginary world to do so. Her work in performance, which goes back to the early 1990s, combines role-playing with caricatured and grotesque staged events focusing on the body, identity, otherness, control and excess. Myriam Laplante lives in Bevagna, Italy.
THE WORKS
Elixir, 2004.
A combination of pharmacy, Frankenstein’s laboratory and a cabinet of horrors, Myriam Laplante’s installation brings together an assortment of beakers and alembics through which various organisms are fed a magical elixir, a sort of life serum that gives rise to strange results. The beings subjected to Laplante’s genetic modifications are, in effect, ill-assorted monsters cobbled together from fragments of animal and human bodies, with atrophied, oversized or multiple limbs. Some of these specimens are displayed in glass jars while others undergo experiments.
EXPLORE
- The concepts of illusion, the fantastic, parody, mockery, cynicism and madness.
- The concepts of scientific and artistic utopias.
- The question of genetic manipulation and biotechnological experimentation.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- With its guinea pigs and its phials filled with a strange liquid, Elixir parodies the world of science laboratories. In your opinion, what links can be established between the processes of artistic creation and scientific experimentation?
- Myriam Laplante’s installation shows us distorted bodies, creatures that have been manipulated. Are you concerned about genetic experimentation? In what way does Laplante’s work invite us to reflect on this issue?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Beauséjour, Mathieu, ed. La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
Macri, Teresa and Lorenzo Benedetti. Myriam Laplante: Elisir. Rome: Fondazione Volume!, The Gallery Apart, 2006.
Déry, Louise. La Parodie du monde selon Myriam Laplante. Montréal: Galerie de l’UQAM, 2002.
Since the late 1980s, Claude Perreault has been creating assemblages and collages that use parody to explore consumer society and the world of the media. Made up of images gleaned from pornographic magazines and trinkets unearthed in dollar stores, Perreault’s works reproduce, with a truly striking degree of illusionism, certain cult personalities of the star system, along with some of the prized objects of consumerism. His work also draws on religious iconography and the Baroque aesthetic, which lend them a sacred and ostentatious character. Claude Perreault lives in Montréal.
THE WORKS
Bette, 2006; Cate, 2006; Judi, 2005; Quentin, 2006.
Representing film stars Bette Davis, Judi Dench, Quentin Crisp and Cate Blanchett, all of whom have played Queen Elizabeth I of England on the screen, Perreault’s four collages also echo the iconography of portraits that have become canonical in art history. Bits of bodies, morsels of flesh and fragments of sexual organs taken from pornographic magazines are painstakingly assembled into hyperrealistic collages that bring about strange and grotesque shifts of meaning.
EXPLORE
- The affinities between the voyeurism of the media and that of pornography.
- The ambiguity between the fascination exerted by the details of the work and the repulsion generated when we recognize them in their anatomical and fleshy character.
- Ways of thinking about the representational codes of the star system and the pictorial conventions of the portrait through art history.
- The concepts of abundance, saturation, profusion and excess.
A FEW QUESTIONS
- A careful and painstaking examination of Claude Perreault’s sumptuous collages reveals grotesque and crude details that momentarily intrude upon their generally splendid character. What effects are produced by this dual way of reading them, by their double meaning?
- Perreault’s works invite us to draw near and study them carefully. Does this relationship of proximity change the way in which we usually relate to works of art? Why?
- In your opinion, how can people’s curiosity and immoderate appetite for popular media figures be compared to sexual and pornographic attraction and obsession?
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
Beauséjour, Mathieu, ed. La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
St-Laurent, Stefan. “An Interview with Claude Perreault.” Mix, vol. 24, no. 4 (Spring 1999): 30-37.
Marchand, Keith, “Pornography and plastic.” Montreal Mirror (December 11-18 1997). www.montrealmirror.com
ADDITIONAL SOURCES OF INFORMATION
PUBLICATION
Beauséjour, Mathieu, ed. La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
Selected Bibliography
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.
Dubé, Peter. ”Serpents with birds, and lambs with tigers joined: On the passage of one word and an idea through a culture,” in La tête au ventre. Montréal: Leonard & Bina Ellen Gallery, 2007.
Iehl, Dominique. Le grotesque. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997.