EventsBoris Chouvellon — Running on empty
Exhibition
Boris Chouvellon
Running on empty
Past: October 14, 2011 → January 8, 2012
Running on Empty at the MAC is everything but a show that reveals itself in a brief instant, even though the artist himself likes to evoke the possibility of a fluid stroll, from which one would only go away with a few snapshots. No doubt an elegant manner to distance himself from his work, while establishing a balanced relationship between his way of traveling through space and this introspective feedback on the art produced. At the same time, he suggests that the visitor can go through the exhibition with a similar detachment, and conceives that this behavioral mimetism can become the expression of a new singular form of relationship to the world.
Running on Empty essentially presents original or reinterpreted works. It assembles the photographs, videos, sculptures and installations made since 2005. Most of the sculptures and installations are made of concrete and steel. Their materiality is dense and solid. The reference to construction is omnipresent right up to the images of paving landscapes and in the videos that present construction site engines. It has become the artist’s signature and that’s the reason why he chose Running on Empty, 2011, the generic image of a gravel container overhanging the sea to announce his exhibition. This reference gives the works a certain brutality that acts as a way of distancing while at the same provoking a real visual and sensitive impact. The plastic force is unsettling, for it plays as much on the risk evoked by this rough materiality of the surfaces, as on the archaic force of the tools, the hardness of the irons, or the cutting edge of the steels, as on the refined elegance of the chromatic series, and of principals of composition and lay out. The motifs belong to popular iconography, that of a trivialized consumer society: The star, the stand, the flag, the commercial zone, the edge of the sea — but the titles are there to play on the meaning of the words and reinforce the poetic character, as unexpected as the complex set of references thought out by Boris Chouvellon. Thus My Ruin Before Yours, 2009, magnificent concrete star impaled by its (concrete) irons, star fallen from the heavenly body, escapes from the immediate “pop” quote, probably thanks to the memory of the famous image of a bald spot in the form of a star, marking Marcel Duchamp’s skull. This work, clearly announced as autobiographical through its title and its constituents, indicates the importance of historical and political references that are at the heart of Boris Chouvellon’s project. At the same time, the tribute that he pays to Duchamp and Man Ray indicates his preference for a mode of expression of references that privilege signs falling within the field of art. We thus understand that this work can evoke the representations of Saint-Sebastian as well as a certain form of vanity, before evoking a political situation, either red or black. The vanity theme is seen again in The Small Illusions, 2008, a set of several columns constituted of sports trophies. The head to tail assembly gives a Brancusian form to their silhouette. But in this case, the depression of the title unequivocally evokes the oblivion of these small glories, whether that of prize winners or the personalities that presented them with these trophies. The flight of the Brancusian quotation thus quickly becomes dissolved in the kitsch of these glittering cascades of colored trophies. In another version on the same principal, adapted to a patron’s commission1, repeated athletic achievement is treated with irony, when the same columns support the canopy intended for a bed in a hotel room.
In the same way as the vanity is emblematic on the individual level, the ruin becomes the emblematic sign of the collective. Overall, with Reponcer le Monde, from 2009, constituted of a dumpster for industrial waste, in which the bottom has been sanded in order to reflect the planisphere in the exposed steel metallic mirror. Or with Infinita Riviera, from 2011, jet-ski wreckage covered with concrete and surrounded by images of dilapidated flags Untitled, 2007-2011. In these works, the processes of physical degradation act like revelators of world disorders. The work takes on a critical dimension and conveys by way of means used by Arte Povera artists: conceptual radicalism, poor materials, simple procedures, sophisticated esthetics, poetic lightness, and the necessity of artistic commitment. The series of shredded flags Untitled, 2007-2011 presents itself as a reading of the process of the creation of polysemy in a clear way. A framing concentrated on the flag, or rather what’s left of it after the test of time, a low-angle shot organizing the relationship to the object into a hierarchy, and thus making it into a metaphor for the individual/State relationship, the uniform blue of the skies on which each flag stands out like an iconic figure, and finally the arabesque of the colored tissues lifted up by the wind. Figure of dynamism and figure of ruin, figure worrying and dancing at the same time, that of the future of nations, where yesterday’s emblem was flamboyant, while today its authority seems so vulnerable. In very little time, from 2007 to 2011, the work evoked the double degradation of national identity: First its possible dissolution in globalization, and today its disappearance in the market domination.
The artist’s commitment finds its most ambitious form in another project, again in relation to the landscape, with the series of images of sea fronts, translated by a slip as Death Front, 2003-2010. Expressing a sort of saturation, disgust, lassitude, and banality, the views of the paving of the Mediterranean coast are, following the example of the paving itself, ever increased in the manner of Peter Friedl’s Playgrounds2. This example of images shows the border between sea and land in a sort of road-movie, a displacement as physical as it is mental, that inexorably leads one to think of the dispossession under way. In another video, Untitled, from 2010, the privatization of collective landscape is evoked by the artist in a slow lateral movement through which he undertakes blocking the entire field of vision opening onto the open sea, by alternatively carrying two construction site grids that block the access. Action as derisory as it is definitively enlightening in a Sisyphian attempt of territorial conquest, which could just as well be interpreted as the impossibility to block the shores from those arriving by sea. The point of view adopted in each one of these two works precisely defines the status of the author of these images: Alternately, observer without quality in one, and rendered anonymous actor by the distance in the other. In the two cases, the elimination of the artist is carried out to the benefit of the allegory.
1 Fondation Vacances Bleues
2 Peter Friedl — Works 1964-2006, exhibition at the MAC Marseille Museum of Contemporary Art from 30 June to 16 September 2007.