It isn’t just the recent renovation of the gallery: Montreal painter Sylvain Bouthillette is exhibiting 15HERTZ, a series of paintings whose current pervades the space of Galerie Trois Points. Noting that most were painted in 2012—including several large works with dimensions of two metres and more—I was impressed with both the magnitude of the artist’s output and its cohesive presentation. As I realized, the repeating motifs, shapes and colours are in service of something beyond (or below…) mere aesthetic experience.
Wikipedia tells me that hertz is a unit of measurement of electromagnetic waves, “defined as the number of cycles per second of a periodic phenomenon.† It is often used to describe sounds such as musical tones; the average adult can perceive sounds with frequencies between 20 and 20,000Hz. Right away, the exhibition title points to something ineffable, something that we cannot wrangle as conscious experience. This notion seems connected to Bouthillette’s repeating motifs of the vanitas, the skull—which has a long and illustrious, though sober, life in art. Used often in Dutch and Italian painting of the 16th and 17th centuries, for example, the vanitas skulls symbolized the meaninglessness and ephemeral nature of earthly life: they were a common feature of memento mori paintings, which meant “remember that you will die.†While in centuries past this was often in support of a religious incentive program of fear and salvation, Bouthillette’s contemporary use of the skull has been more closely related to the Buddhist kind of investigation of the void: vanitas means emptiness. The large skulls in several of his compositions seem suspended amid the controlled chaos of colour, direction, and texture: at once frictionless vessels and generative nodes of energy.
The influence of music on Bouthillette’s painting, like the repeated motif of the vanitas, has its own art-history. It has often been closely connected with artistic interest in synaesthesia, or the co-operation of the senses, which in turn was tied to investigations of the spiritual dimension by the historical avant-garde. Kandsinsky’s 1910 booklet On the Spiritual in Art is a well-known attestation to this; in his paintings, he sought to give the energy of music a visible shape and material presence. Piet Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie (1943), with its grid-like arrangement of small squares in primary colours, also tried to express the tones and staccato rhythms of his favourite dance music, while evoking the topography of his adopted city of New York.
This is how it feels to look at Bouthillette’s large works (which, interestingly, are also largely comprised of primary colours): the interplay of radiating lines in red or black—like lasers, I couldn’t help thinking—with confident, albeit wilder, strokes, sprays and splashes, vibrates with energy that isn’t just visual. Additionally, the artist’s use of text—usually simple and strong phrases in block lettering—both add formal structure to the compositions and signify a linguistic, sonorous element that amplifies the buzz.
Galerie Trois Points, space
Sylvain Bouthilette
15HERTZ
September 8 – October 6, 2012
www.galerietroispoints.qc.ca
