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2/5/2012

Ismail Bahri / Joris Van de Moortel

Galerie Les Filles-du-Calvaire, Paris

Ismaïl Bahri

Précipités

The gallery is happy to present the first solo exhibition of Ismaïl Bahri. For the past ten years this artist has been living between Paris and Tunis. He creates a singular universe by mixing oriental culture with philosophical and conceptual European references. The formal base of his work questions artistic problems.

At first you can’t see anything. A glass, a reflection, then a hand picking it up. Then, on the surface of the dark liquid, a few waves form, tremors. The glass overflows, the ink spreads over the skin, escapes, in fits and starts, over the thumb and the fingers. Seconds pass. The ink keeps on running away. It is almost unreal, it flows, it leaves its mark around it; the glass doesn’t empty. Infinitesimal, it’s just drops, and yet it has already invaded its surface. A few seconds more, then a building, a tree perhaps, moved into the negative of black ink, through the axis if symmetry of the reflection; the reverse image of our world emerges. The amazing journey of Orientations, an emblematic Ismaïl Bahri video, can start. Because in this journey across the city, with the surface of a glass as the sole skyline, all the issues of an unusual work are played out, a work which takes hold of the infinitesimal solely to show its possible giddiness.

His polymorphous art passes by way of photography, video, drawing and installation, as so many ways of re-enacting the act of “withdrawal”, of bringing about, if not an event, then at the very least an opposite posture. And if the artist’s approach seems elusive, mistrusting codes and representation, it is in no way an evasion. Because the withdrawal leaves a trace, or, as he himself puts it, “attracts attention through the very fact that it pulls back1”. It is precisely this modesty at work which turns his work into something that gives rise to possibilities of sense.

BLURRED SIGHT, THE BLURREDNESS OF SIGHT
Ismaïl Bahri’s works are haunted by shortsightedness, and set a point to turn into the epicentre of a tremor in progress. As a phenomenology of the infinitesimal, his approach self-imposes a landmark which magnetizes the eye, attaches it to it, and all around unfurls the world’s flow. Whether what is involved is the glass of ink in Orientations or the thread of Dénouement, the camera, just like the eye, seems to be grappling with the focal distance of the objects. But this prism through which the world is reflected does not reveal any “essence”; it merely helps to concentrate within it the immensity of the field. When the piece of thread in Dénouement jumps, when it is stretched and re-stretched as it is wound up, it is everything that happens outside it that is brought to the gaze. So it is in the relation between this thread and the world that the work fits, in the complex network of the imprints of the invisible on each perceptible element. Unlike a shrinkage, this concentration of the image in no way makes everything that is outside the field off-side.

In playing relentlessly with space, in incorporating himself within it and merging with it in snippets (a hand, a silhouette, a shadow), the artist does not simply cast a shortsighted eye on things: he himself maintains a certain shortsightedness with regard to it. And in this ethereal cloud, he blurs the boundaries of his art, of the very place of the creator within the process, resisting with all his might any resumption by discourse. The dialogue embarked upon in Orientations with a passer-by, in which, when asked about his strange undertaking, he invites a different way of looking at the city, is eloquent—it helps to imagine him training his camera on a glass, his eyes on the control screen, strolling somewhat unsteadily in the streets of Tunis. This blurredness which develops around the artist is crucial: it prevents the works coming to an end, and turns them into organisms, which are nevertheless kept in a certain autonomy.

HAPPENING
The fact is that Ismaïl Bahri organizes the advent of form, he creates arrangements for setting up the conditions of the event’s happening. The series Latence thus shows ink at the origin of this setting; on its own, it coagulates and becomes solidified on contact with air, forming on the surface of the glass a white circle on a ground that is detached from the black ground. These deposits then trace layers, regular and otherwise, which tally with the chronology of their hardening. Ismaïl Bahri’s artistic gesture goes beyond the mere creation of an image and grasps the form, the outcome of its existence and the time of its formation. In this sense, if he plays with codes, he stays aloof from scientific requirement; once worked out, the experimental procedure becomes the work’s nerve centre. In the video Dénouement, he subordinates its slow progress to the execution of an invisible constraint, in the first instance, and contrary to all effectiveness. In knotting a thread stretching over several dozen yards, his limping silhouette approaches, condemned only to progress at the whim of a disconcerting body language. Obedience to this rite forces the spectator to, in turn, withstand his own time-frame. Freed from any concern about “response”, Ismaïl Bahri has nothing scientific in his laboratory; his artistic knowledge makes the world his laboratory. He isolates an invisible frame and works its surface to bring out a deviance. As such, his work clashes with any actual idea of positivism; it is no longer a matter of demonstrating, but of de-monstrating, finding a way of leading to ‘monstration’—the act of showing—without “displaying” a sense, by remaining removed from any vague impulse to express something. In a way, stripping the act of ‘monstration’ of its desire to impose a posture, a discourse. Or how to once again emphasize the possibility for the infinitesimal to create the event. Whence the importance of propagation by capillarity in his method.

With the series of photographs titled Sang d’encre, the skin becomes a constellation. Unlike paint, as a fantasy of mastery of colour on the surface, ink colonizes, it does not sink into its subject, it runs on top of it, gradually erases it, and marks it with the seal of absence. As an intimate “adhesion” of the materials that we find in his Films, the pieces of newspapers unfurl, by the mere force of the liquid, drawing a line which tears the darkness, as if pushed by a life of its own. From this noiseless unfurling there emerges a novel narrative where the meaning, no longer determined by the nature of the ensuing events, is subordinated to the time-frame of their “happening”. So, just as the system of capillarity introduces the need for a force of cohesion in the elements, Ismaïl Bahri’s works re-enact this experience, in their ongoing dialogue.

THE NOISE OF THE WORLD
As such, if a form of resistance does exist in the artist, it is indeed that electric force which releases a thermal power in a circuit. By retaining a current, it merges with it and then frees it, totally transformed. Constantly in action, through the disturbance of the world, it presents this infinitesimal variation which makes the difference between its possibility and its impossibility. A process at the heart of Attraction, which invents a dreamlike dialogue between a hand and a shaft of light, sporadically, that organ that has become food for thought. The darkness becomes eloquent; absence fills the twilight like a zone of production of undefined forces. Whether trace or procreation, the imprints become bodies, and disappearance becomes a basic datum of the gesture. Henceforth, the end, indefinitely repeated, no longer has anything tragic about it. On the edge of meanings and symbols, it is in the end a silent and thoroughly living world which Ismaïl Bahri brings before our gaze. Its noise wells up in his work, like the basso continuo of invisibles.

These invisibles are the events revealed by the experimental procedure. An idea at work in the video Ligne, which fixes a drop placed on an arm, permeated by the pulse of blood in the veins. These infinitesimal spasms confuse ideas. What, in terms of blood flow or drop, is to be observed in this arrangement? This is an empty issue insomuch, once again, as the artist unveils the basic absence of hierarchy of the world, restoring its place to the encounter of different forms of matter which have nothing to prove, except their interaction, by experiencing themselves, themselves. So if this noise of the world keeps all its strangeness and mystery, through the intervention of this artist-cum-intercessor, it ineffably acquires a tremendous spirit of possibility. Each attempt does its utmost to find a point of balance for observing the world, reversing the principles to create the event on the surface and pierce its obviousness, obliterating its banality in order, in the end, to rediscover the dizziness of the infinitesimal. Text by Guillaume Benoit, in Semaine, Edition Analogues, to be published on May 2012. Copyright of the author. ----- Joris Van de Moortel Erratum musicale for 3 guitars and a metronome Hanging in progress
Defying artistic categories, Joris van de Moortel’s work can be described as sculptural, architectural, performative, musical, pictorial, or even pertaining to the installation art genre. Similarly, various historical references are encompassed in his practice. But they are portrayed indirectly, through subverted art forms. In that way, young Flemish artist Joris van de Moortel is iconoclastic. When he is doing a residency, he turns his studio space (or studiolo) into a Merzbau by creating a temporary workshop inside it. It becomes a sort of stage on and in which he can perform all kinds of activities. He shows that space, and at the end of the exhibition he dismantles and cuts up the architecture-come-installation subject into different pieces which he takes elsewhere. They can, of course, be made up of ‘real art pieces’ created on location, but they can also be walls, doors, or windows within the workspace which he turns into sculptural elements. The artist then rearranges these, or other residual components, in other exhibition spaces where they morph into just as many categorical pieces of work.

To get a sneak preview of this exhibition, the gallery invited Joris van de Moortel over last October to create a monumental piece which was shown during Pearls of the North, a group exhibition of artists from the Benelux countries who had been put forward by various galleries. For that event, the artist offered to build a workspace perched upon gigantic trestles, like a musical stage obstructed by walls. His intention was to work in this space for 48 hours non-stop. The formal result was a large white cube, 4x4x4 metres in size, with guitar sounds coming out of it, maybe as a way of reminiscing the artist’s presence. This resonating music could lead visitors' attentions to a tiny elevated window. A merry jumble could be seen through it; traces of creative activity which combined musical instruments and accessories, painting materials and polished sculptural and pictorial elements. The artist smashed a hole in the side of the wall, which he used to go through into the cell.

An upside- down chair was on the edge for him to climb up. It doubled up as a delicate visual barrier that forbade complete access to this exclusive space. But this opening offered another perspective, enabling inside elements to be noticed as if they were remnants of an evolving trail of thought. This type of plastic experience is similar to other performances that Joris van de Moortel has created, during openings or happening concerts, with other musicians who take part in games of massacre or coating that the artist encourages during the show. For example, paint is thrown at actors wearing masks and dressed up in suits, those who take part end up totally covered. The stage then becomes the art piece. Yet this residual incongruity manages to astonish through its highly formal resonance.

During another ‘concert’, musicians create and act simultaneously, and at the end musical instruments and ‘offenders’ are covered in a slimy, coloured paste. The provocative attitude of Mike Kelly comes to mind, albeit a little less gory. The resulting works, however, are often ‘beautiful’ because they are redirected by the artist. He remodels them, raises them, and through this conceptual shift, grants them the status of works of art. So it can indeed be referred to as creating, adding various musical and sculptural elements. But it is also a radical position and although it may be provocative and iconoclastic, it remains true to art by transforming the whole into as many conceptual trophies.

In other works, the musical element isn’t broken down as much. On the contrary, the importance of music in the process is often magnified by plastic form. The artist, who is also a musician, goes beyond vinyl discs, which he can edit to create his own work. As it was, my first encounter with his work was a battery which had been musically exhibited within a kind of minimal style window box which glorified plastic and musical quotations. In a kind of artistic premise, although it is an earlier piece of work, it is very well established as much in its form as in the references it implies. Later, he created more of them, ‘trashier’ versions where the window-cube and/or the glass have been partially smashed. This could remind us of the destructive moves of Steven Parrino, who did paintings which he pounded with a sledgehammer. Symptomatically, his moves were backed by an aggressive musical performance.

Joris van de Moortel’s approach also grew from this iconoclastic obedience and from a deconstructing minimal trend. It is radical and it contains rock or even punk, and trash. However, when we look at his work, there is no feeling of a disillusioned Parrino-esque act. It may well have contained such feelings should his work not have been marked by diverging humour which, in a poetic overturn, brought him closer to the postures of Marcel Duchamp and Marcel Broodthaers.

Van de Moortel has in fact, paid a splendid tribute to Duchamp with a monumental work of art le grand verre, zelfs (2009) which epitomised the famous box in a suitcase containing the artist’s entire universe. The version of the young Belgian artist is an architectural sculpture and a tasty and grasping interpretation for specialists. The suitcase reference is straightforward and very funny but what particularly stands out is the way in which Joris van de Moortel rethinks the space. He lives in it, he builds an office in it, and he creates a workspace that allows his own formal repertoire to loiter. The very sculpture, however, rises with a big piece of glass, directly reminding of Duchamp’s iconic piece of art which withstands any definite interpretation. Here again, it seems to me that this piece evolves mischievously and Joris van de Moortel is challenging our critical analysis.

But that is not the most provocative thing the artist can do. Sometimes, he straight out encourages rejection. During a solo show in his Belgian gallery Hoet Bekaert at the Artbrussels exhibition fair of 2009, he grouped all the pieces that had previously been displayed in the gallery space by attaching them with a huge elastic band, thus rebutting their individuality and forbidding any objective reading of his works. As a kind of agglomerate repoussoir, it was more of a protest manifesto than a consensual approach for a space as commercial as an exhibition fair. It goes without saying that we cannot really know beforehand what Joris van de Moortel has in store for us with his first solo exhibition at the gallery, but he is one of those risks that we take because they provoke feelings of joy and anticipation. By Christine Ollier, Translated by Demelza Desforges

Text by Guillaume Benoit, in Semaine, Edition Analogues, to be published in May 2012. // Copyright of the author.

Getting to grips with Joris Van de Moortel’s oeuvre is like taking a plunge into the thick of a storm. Hewing out a groove within a whirlwind of forms, an accumulation of materials and sounds, driving in their wake the scattered elements of one and the same set of issues. What does inhabiting space mean, and how is its construction to be thought of? Far from being reduced to joyful odes to destruction, his installations relaunch the charge inherent in their own definition; the work is bound to be “installed” in space. If we often find caissons, those precarious shelters which seem to minimalize the concept of architecture, what is involved, in each one of his works, is the use of a place calling to mind the extent to which human spatial claims are forms of violence. Violence of the object, violence of occupation, and also and above all the violence done to our way of looking at things, that awakening through the force of passivity, forbidding the spectator to be immobile. For behind the generosity, behind the pleasure of accumulation, there hides the real secret of these insane dwellings, filled with blow-lamps, broken window panes and slivers and shards of materials; a modesty in action huddled in those cramped spaces where, despite its relative precariousness, life is definitely possible. And life appears in many forms in this world lived in by recurrent motifs forever being renewed. An invisible energy which runs through all his works and rustles like the shudder of a cataclysm tracing a new understanding of destruction.

NOMADISM
If he himself tries to bear each one of the materials which he uses “to the limit”, this is because he takes them faraway from any symbolism. His surprisingly rich vocabulary passes through forced reunion as much as through the explosion of distinct elements linked to different contexts. As if caught in a trap, the musical instruments are caged in boxes, cast in concrete or prisoners of caissons. Then, free once again, they are sometimes covered with a monochrome paint, minimal sculptural elements incorporated in an accumulation of ephemeral constructions and rough structures threatening at any moment, through their instability, to destroy themselves all over again. There is, likewise, territorial instability in the repeated use of boxes containing instruments, minimalist models of dwellings filled or otherwise with summary figures or alternatively with objects wrenched from their initial structure (pieces of wall, doors, etc.).

The container is thus endowed with a twofold virtue; acting as a presentation frame for his world to stage them in a new context, it also reproduces the Duchampian fantasy of a transportable art, a nomadic creation always able to leave its territory. His boxes, which, in a way, thwart their own scenography, are not permitted any fixation, and introduce into their very presence the proximity of their absence. Whence, undoubtedly, the artist’s tendency to ceaselessly reactivate his own pieces from one exhibition to the next, making different uses of them in space, or, with the help of thick tape, concentrating them in a single structure. So, for Joris Van de Moortel, adding, reversing, altering and removing elements becomes a fully-fledged expression, refusing to freeze in the form of works this approach which, in a tangible way, remains an open construction site.

PIERCING MEANING
This openness also proceeds by way of something agape, through the visible piercing of his Moules/Casts (stretchers of framed pictures without their canvas), and his precarious huts, giving glimpses of the entrails of a very particular kind. Whether they authorize an activity, like his Studio Unlimited (a wooden structure accommodating recording equipment within it) or not, Joris Van de Moortel’s spaces are formed by metal organs and plastic veins. Amplifiers, electric wires and various cables fill these dwellings which, devoid of any “practical” virtue, can only be grasped from certain angles, holding onto an intimacy akin to that of life. As he forges his pictures, making openings in their structures, he involves the process of “seeing” but without tipping over into showing (monstration). Otherwise put, the work does not encourage being seen, but rather prompts us to re- learn the act of seeing.

Like a mythological act of birth, the objects presented bear the stigmata of Joris Van de Moortel’s spectacular performances. Summoning musicians to accompany him on the stage of his show, while he sings and plays guitar, he may, for example, cover his equipment with a liquid wax preparation, or he may have himself sprinkled with white paint in the middle of a performance. But if performance is part and parcel of his work, it has nothing to do with a simple spectacle where the pieces would be just relics. Many of his actions take place off-stage, either behind closed doors before the exhibition’s opening, or even in another place. These not very readable traces thus work like secret marks of a past life, as complex as it is random. Joris Van de Moortel experiments with spaces, arranges forms to get them to tally with each other, retouches them, and rethinks them for an upcoming exhibition. Each intervention, be it an act of violence, a performance, or a painting, is an extra element added to the world which he sets up. In this sense, because his mythology is made up of accidents, predictions and uncertainties, possibilities and failures, it no longer has anything tragic about it.

ARCHITECTURE OF EXPERIENCE
Joris Van de Moortel’s art may bear the stigmata of the limits of Minimalism, but it forces us to rethink them by introducing a recurrent presence—his own—into his works which are relieved of any Expressionism. Whether he occupies space for the benefit of a performance or not, the materials, in their poverty, even remind us of the extent to which he inhabits his oeuvre. By displaying a space of life, whether it is his own, with, for example, This door which was once my studio’s, which installs the door of his own studio on a wall, or whether it involves those spaces which he has occupied for the duration of a performance, the artist abandons any definitive mooring, preferring a past which is as rich as it is elusive, in a concrete way opening up his art beyond boundaries, beyond any limitation, and imposes a novel approach on the spectator. Threatened, shaken, forced to go around, and almost fraudulently enter these aberrant and dizzy-making constructions, the spectator moves around and in the middle of exploded worlds. If the installations strike us by their visual strength, and their uneven gigantism, they do not impose pure contemplation for all that; on the contrary, what is almost involved is encouraging the spectator, in his turn, to go beyond the panelling, and trample on the wax marks in order to enjoy appropriating the place for himself. This is a constant factor with this artist, who makes his presence vibrate through the silent music of “experienced” spaces. In a muted way, and almost illicitly, the work itself goes beyond the artist’s simple discourse, in the same way that, in his disk Erratum musicale for three guitars and a metronome, the metronome—that relentless clockwork device—takes up as much room as the guitars.

In the end, developed in space as if by accident, his works call to mind a reversed collapse, a reversal of gravity. Guided from the ground, the tornado rises into the air and thus loses its merely “destructive” definition, becoming a possibility of aggregation, an accumulation that is, indeed, still violent, but inexpressibly creative. From work to work, it seems, even more so, to continue to grow, extending this same creative impetus which governs his approach. There is a dynamic at work in The Shortest Song goes on and on where, by separately pressing four tracks (guitar, voice, base and drums) of a song in as many disks, and by cutting them in perfect loops, he manages to organize the break-up of an initial model, and turn it into an infinite cycle. In this way, without any theoretical ideology, Joris Van de Moortel provides a practical and enjoyable frame for the concept of deconstruction, and, in an indescribable way, reactivates that share of invention inherent in each one of the human gestures towards objects, turning them into works “with no beginning, middle or end”. And revealing the essential porousness of this borderline between destruction and creation. Guillaume Benoit, 2012

Opening on Thursday the 3rd of May from 6pm until 9pm

Galerie Les Filles-du-Calvaire
17, rue des Filles-du-Calvaire, Paris
Tue-Sat 11/18.30 pm
Free admission

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