After Mimétisme du Mimosa, 2011, Décor pour la vie and plus d'amour que prévu (Festival Bandits-Mages, at the École des Beaux Arts, Bourges), CLIMAX DÉSORIENTÉ falls within the Futur Film Collection season.
The exhibition will present La part du vent, Les joyaux magiques, Les miroirs éblouis, Gold and Silver Camp and Prova Poetica.
Timothée Chaillou : An exhibition's invitation card is its introduction, an initial picture tale, a foreword to the narrative the exhibition will complete. The invitation card to your exhibition at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard pictures a gloved hand, held out towards a mirror reflecting a golden sheet. To associate the hand, and therefore the sense of touch, to gold, refers to the myth of King Midas to whom Dionysos offered the faculty to transform into gold everything he touched. This capacity severed him completely from normal life, preventing him from eating or drinking, while compelling him to transform his close relations into golden statues. Thus, this myth perfectly illustrates the dramatic and deadly aspect of an excessively burning desire and of looking for happiness through the piling up of riches, oppositely to the aristotelian idea of happiness.
The image on your invitation card calls to mind the Hypothèse II - Désaccord sur la valeur des choses, from your Futur Film project : thus, if all is turned into gold, nothing has value anymore. This image is also an introduction to Gold and silver camp.
Véronique Boudier : Shining gloves doesn't escape the mirror issue, a reflection doesn't escape itself, it projects its obsessions. This image doubts its own existence, as it doubts its hypothetical double. I think of Shining by Stanley Kubrick, the paradox, the turnaround caused by the shot of the bar revealed at the last moment...
TC : It is quite disconcerting to see some people, in great misery, exposed to the dangers of the cold, be covered with a golden survival blanket, when gold is the absolute symbol of what they fundamentally lack : money.
VB : This winter, I've been living in my workshop, in a golden tent. At the Galerie Christophe Gaillard, Gold and silver camp occupies the basement, and when we come down, we both enter the space itself and a shelter stretched with survival blankets. Inside is projected Prova poetica, a video in which a man dances holding a flashlight. Thus, the flashlight beam as well as the projector's, light up and reveal the dancer's body, the space in which the performance takes place, and the space in which the video is projected.
TC : In Shining gloves, the hand faces its double. The encounter with its double is an appointment with death. «The fascinating image of a double is therefore, in last resort, nothing other than a mask of horror, its illusionary façade : when we encounter ourselves, we encounter death», Slavoj Zizek reminds us.
VB : CLIMAX DÉSORIENTÉ is an appointment with life and with one another. I don't know how to separate times, present, past and future. In CLIMAX DÉSORIENTÉ, the sculptures, the images, the music and the video are linked by a scenario, and each piece can be part of Futur Film's next scene.
TC : When we enter the Galerie Christophe Gaillard, we find ourselves facing a studio set, as a hypothetical living space : between two walls, curtains are raised by the artificial breath of air coming from behind a window frame. The curtains thus fly according to the will of drafts.
We enter a scripted space, with two sides, that tells us that though we can go on to the other side of the set, it remains an object tied to the cinema's imaginative world.
VB : I think one should see La part du vent as a scenery and as a turnaround of the scenery on itself, a bit like the reflection of a hand in a mirror that would be ungloved by the other. Also in the sense that a scenery is built in order to create an image that substitutes itself to reality ; I, on the other hand, present La part du vent as a sculpture in space, before using it as a performance element in Futur Film, a film I always imagined as a hypothesis of reality.
TC : Going on to the other side of the set, we discover a display cabinet in which gems are laid.
VB : Similarly to La part du vent, Les joyaux magiques is a sculpture but it is also at the heart of the Futur Film narrative, as an illusionary stake to the plot. Les joyaux magiques also happens to be a key element to the main scene of Désaccord sur la valeur des choses, a filmed performance in Futur Film.
TC : What about Les miroirs éblouis ?
VB : These are photographic prints on mirrors. The installation set is again linked to the notion of time. Two of the Miroirs éblouis are permanent features, Song and L'île. However, the evocations, the desires, Song's hopes for a better life, that are landscapes in the daylight or at night, will be presented two by two, consecutively, throughout the length of the exhibition.
TC : Who is Song ? How does Futur Film evolve ?
VB : Song is Human kind, the character in Futur Film's first hypothetical scene, Plus d'amour que prévu, a scene shot in the installation Décor pour la vie, in 2011. I am currently finishing the editing on that film. Futur Film was conceived after witnessing peculiar circumstances during a trip to South-East Asia.
In my last film, Nuit d'un jour, I focused on the relation between habitat and nature in one shot run through by fire. In Futur Film, I extend this relation by introducing the notion of human presence, seizing the encounter of a house abandoned by its occupant and the discovery of a corpse floating in the ocean.
In a miscellany of investigation and alibi, I offer to experiment a reality determined by the images I film and the installation elements I create, amongst which the characters of that fiction and myself find ourselves in turns criminal, victim, actor or spectator.
Gradually, the formal distinctions will come untied until they become a plane of uncertainty that is superimposed on life itself.
Extract from Timothée Chaillou and Véronique Boudier's interview, february 2014
CLIMAX DÉSORIENTÉ is Véronique Boudier's second solo show mixing sculpture, installation, photography and video at the Galerie Christophe Gaillard.
Discovered during the « L'hiver de l'amour » exhibition organized by Purple Magazine at the ARC, Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1994, Véronique Boudier is a rare and important artist, who follows her path without the worry to produce, if not thought, at least the embodiment of thought.
Her film Nuit d'un jour, was programmed at the Printemps de septembre in Toulouse, at the centre Pompidou (Prospectif cinéma / elles@centrepompidou), at the Centre d'art le Lait and lately at the FRAC Limousin. Véronique Boudier participated to the first edition of La force de l'art in 2006 and was the object of several monographic exhibitions at the Villa Arson (2005), the Ecole régionale des beaux-arts de Rouen (2008) and at la Maison Grégoire and BN Project, Bruxelles (2010).
Her work belongs to various public collections amongst which the FRAC Ile-De-France, FRAC Basse-Normandie, FRAC Limousin, the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain, Strasbourg, the Fond National d'Art Contemporain or even the Centre Pompidou.