Galerie Trois Points is thrilled to present Constructions de l’histoire, a group exhibition featuring gallery artists Sylvain Bouthillette, Milutin Gubash along guests Nicolas Dufour-Laperrière, Pierre Durette and Jérôme Ruby, from January 17 to February 14. An invitation to a reflection on the vagaries of history and how it is constructed, each of these artists questions the ideas of power, memory and spirituality.
Constructions de l’histoire presents works that act as a counterweight to the powers that be, a reflection on resistance and oppression, whether political or religious. Exploring how personal and collective identities are built, the selected works exhibit what Didi-Huberman called the truth of a repressed time of history, revealing the monolithic and almost impenetrable myths that shape us by proposing a pluralistic way of representing history.
In Pierre Durette’s work, the historical narrative is constructed through a series of anachronisms as the artist is depicting abstract spaces that appear to be under siege, within which stems and school buses genuinely coexist. Echoing the compositions of Brueghel the Elder, Durette draws a multitude of small characters who take as much from the childhood world as from the epic, featuring improbable guerillas through accumulation of details from a military imagery that evolved over time.
Evoking the founding of the city of New York, Jérôme Ruby’s work explores the power struggles through various symbols and references to art history – namely quoting Rodin’s Thinker and Bourdelle’s Hercules the Archer, embodying both Reason and Strength. The tension between the Amerindian and the settler recalls the power relations into play, offering a comment on how history is fabricated with the story of the winners.
Milutin Gubash plays with the ambiguous potential of images, so that one can hardly measure its degree of construction to the fullest. Featured in this exhibition is a work from the Who Will Will Our Will series that focuses on monuments commissioned by Tito as instruments of propaganda to glorify and consolidate his power. Gubash magnifies these structures left abandoned and short of any significance after the fall of the regime, showing them larger than life and opened to a whole new potential of meaning and interpretation.
The works of Sylvain Bouthillette selected for this exhibition question the tension between the individual and society, focusing on notions of faith and resilience, highlighting our relationships to spirituality and the often-absurd power struggles. The quest for inner peace drives these works from Bouthillette, articulated as much in the highly politically charged pieces as in the representations of important religious figures such as St. Jude and Brother André.
This reference to religion is core to Nicolas Dufour-Laperrière’s works here presented. From the series Théorie des Corps, his photographs explore the world of Jesuits in a reflection on time and complex communities’ memory – that of formerly powerful men, of a singular and external universe to our secular daily. The young photographer looks at the current socio-political context, stretched between a loss of meaning and trust, between societies’ identity difficulties in these times of redefinition, and their quest for a new collective project, choosing to think about what was to project what will be.
Text: Galerie Trois Points
More info: www.galerietroispoints.com
