During my discussions with Mr. Robert Oremus, Head of Cultural Affairs for the Departmental Council of Charente-Maritime, and while looking at some of my pieces from 20 years ago, we had the idea of establishing a connection between these pieces and the work I have done since. Indeed, my 1984 installation foreshadowed the work of the ensuing 20 years. The paintings in the exhibition Itineraries depict of course, in various forms, the lonely path of the paper forest: openings indicating the passage of an animal, rivers, shafts of light. But we also see how the elements of the initial itinerary (animal guides, costumes/fusion and progression towards an enigmatic glow of light) each became in following years the object of entire exhibitions. As if this program had been set, my work continued in various countries, through various media, each group of work celebrating one element set in different landscapes, those of Charente or Iceland. For the hanging I used relics (photographs and drawings) of the 1984 installation as a starting point on the two far walls, then placing groups of paintings opposite each other: Belgium and Charente on the right wall, Canada and Iceland on the left wall. Each wall is accompanied by a sound installation creating an audio environment evoking a stroll: dialogues in Icelandic, Nordic bird cries and cascades on the one hand, chatting in French, croaking frogs and the cries of forest birds on the other. The little bicycle, fragile and stubborn, and the two animals progress up the path that represents all of the others: the path-river-light.
------
About the Retrospective Exhibition ITINERARIES ( Parcours )
« La Tonnellerie », Brouage
Departmental Council of Charente-Maritime, France
March 4 - April 17, 2005.
Using pieces from my past exhibitions, I have attempted to demystify a little, within the scope of my work, exclusively what is called inspiration and describe part of my evolution as a visual artist over the past twenty years. As one of the requirements of the Master of Visual Arts in Canada was to analyze our own creative processes, certain mechanisms were revealed, although they existed previously, during my installation Once Upon a Time . That is why I have chosen it as a starting point.
Conceived during a difficult period in my life, this installation, shown in Toronto (Canada) in 1983-84, originated in the haunting mental image of a blue bicycle. I drew the blue bicycle, as much to rid myself of it as out of curiosity as to what it might lead to. Then, in powerful dreams, a flood of other elements followed, appearing in the form of recurrent mental images: paths, forests, animals. I wrote down each dream, then drew the elements to define their shapes, the connections between them, their exact nature. I began research (Freud, Jung, universal symbols common to dreams, art, mythology and fairy tales) to understand their meaning and their role in symbolic terms.
I had set up installations before and had also worked with varnished tissue paper. The installation format and the materials spontaneously came together: I had to be able to penetrate physically into the piece and the elements needed to have the haziness of dreams or memories. After a few months, it seemed obvious that my psyche was constructing a fairy tale in the form of an installation and, through the symbolic use of beings and objects dear to me, it was explaining the necessity of letting go of one stage of life in order to progress towards the next. The figure, accompanied by the animal-guides symbolizing intuition (a rabbit, a dove, a snail), was penetrating the forest of subconsciousness, borrowing from it, as it journeyed towards the light, increasingly large costumes of which only a fragile molt remained.
My fairy tale, as all others, was giving me a lesson in life: progressing on the path of life means accepting change. I had also come to understand one of the mechanisms of my creative process: experience, dreams, mental images, integration into the piece, analysis, and my recurrent archetypes (paths, forests, animal life, light).
These two discoveries caused a tremendous surge of energy within me, but also forced me to change mediums. Suddenly, I needed the graphic effects of oil sticks or oil pastels to convey it; the luminous disk towards which led my path took in my drawings the form of dances where two opposing and complementary forces whirled round (male/female, destruction/creation).
Life led me to Iceland, the land of volcanos, roaring rivers and fiery salmon. Having swallowed the path, the disk filled with volcanic fire and engendered a turbulent icy river.
As if erected in praise of this extraordinary procreation, a monumental spiral of green stone rose to the sky. The Magician appeared like a master builder. The fish, salmon, anglers or giant halibut I saw in real life, came to me in dreams amidst bare landscapes, one after the other, like the rabbits and snails once had, and I tried in my way to pay them tribute by drawing them.
In the heart of Iceland's dark and bluish winters, I began to miss the southern sun and found myself attracted to oil painting for the intensity of its colors. Breaking with several years of working from dreams, in 1994 I created "A Pond, A Tree": a yellow canvas born of the nostalgia of my fusion with a summer landscape bathed in sunshine. Environment and body interpenetrated. A few months later, we moved to Belgium taking with us our dog that joined me on long daily walks. During one of my first walks in the forests of Charente-Maritime (Department of central France, on the Atlantic coast.), I experienced a fusion in real time. I can still recall the circumstances: in the warm, still air, intangible under the tall trees, I felt I had no bodily boundaries. I felt in complete osmosis with the green light even as I sensed the furtive movements of animal life around me.
The forest in its entirety, animals and plants, had become my costume. Two exhibits were born from this magical experience, including Forest Walk (1999): a series of canvases where the figure floats in a semi-abstract landscape visited by foxes, roe deer and sometimes my black dog. I worked my landscapes from memory in preliminary watercolor paintings then integrated drawings of the faces of family members. Their bodies were nature itself.
Back in Iceland, I tried, in my new environment, to regain this state of grace. For months, I applied myself to the study of color, taking photographs, painting watercolors, trying to "internalize" the Icelandic landscape. I then chose the landscapes I felt closest to and tried to treat them like I had in Forest Walk . This resulted in the series Inhabited Landscapes (2000). The bare landscapes, characterized by large surfaces of monochromatic gradations, left me however with less freedom to integrate human forms or multiple perspectives.
In my work and in my daily life, I needed exuberant plant life in which to immerse myself. With a new exhibition, Places of Conjunction (2001), I reused, but in smaller scale, summer watercolors of my parents' garden in Pont L'Abbé d'Arnoult and my former garden in Brussels, photocopied, cut up and reassembled into a multitude of views, with or without human figures. At the time, I wrote:
«My works are my way of honoring outdoor spaces I have felt I belong to and that have become a part of me. My pictures do not pretend to be objective or realistic renderings of these places, but are an assembly of specific details, plant or animal life, plays of light, which have acquired with time, and on a personal level, a mythical dimension such as memory or history are prone to create [...] The selection process, which I don not consciously control, takes place when I have felt in true harmony with my environment. In certain works, this is personalized by the archetype of a young being emerging from the plants like a bud or hugging them tightly.»
Wandering with my dog near Reykjavik, I discovered in a small valley a park made of old abandoned gardens, one of those ancient holiday spots the city had grown towards to the point of encompassing. The perennials, pink lupine, alpine cornflowers, rhubarb, angelica, and chervil had overrun the red birch woods tortured by the winter. There, in July, concentrated on one square kilometer, I found a paradise of exuberant and wild greenery. This place became one of my favorite spots and the object of new studies. Between 2001 and 2003 appeared the green canvases: the green of the "Four Old Gardens", the acid green of nature hastening to exist. I no longer used neither dreams nor memories. The summers were too brief and the winters too long. But my work remained similar. Using quick watercolor paintings and photographs, I documented the shafts of light that fascinated me. From these, in my studio, I created a second more finely worked watercolor painting that I photocopied. I then cut and pasted several photocopies, thus creating visual discrepancies like those produced by memories or dreams. For example, juxtaposing views from above and views from below which creates a continuity in the light's trajectory different from the continuity of the planes; hence this slightly magical or off-center appearance in comparison with a traditional realist landscape. If I was conscious of this I did not express it at the time. Now, freed of the human figure, I was hypnotized by the action of the light itself:
«Little by little, I have eliminated animals and human presence from my paintings. All that remains are plants and light [...] Light reveals the angle and direction, the color, the shape, the density, that is to say the very existence of the plants. Without light, as is the case in the shaded areas of my paintings, things remain indistinct, unintelligible. In the shaded area, is there a rock or a thick bush? The object is there, but since we can not see it, it does not exist for us. The propagation of light reveals to our consciousness or conceals from it entire parts of our surroundings which are nevertheless close to us.»
For a while I had had the desire to integrate real rivers into my forest landscapes in order to multiply the effects of light. I had childhood memories of the woody banks of the Boutonne and its adjoining canals in their tunnels of greenery. In Iceland, the rivers lack neither in number nor character, but none of them are lined with trees. A second stay relatively near Charente-Maritime, has allowed me to follow through with my project. The forests of Charente-Maritime, which delight my eyes and soul, did at first intimidate me as an artist. In comparison with the small forests of Iceland, nestled in the hallows of small valleys and whose exuberant ground level plant-life takes by storm the dwarf trees, these forests look equatorial. Their uncontrollable riot of greenery seems to rise into the air independently from the trunks, rolling all-consuming waves over the surrounding hedges and the tranquil rivers multiply each curl, doubling the height, the majesty. In the maze of these forests, back to which my work guided me, I go in search of the rivers of light, filtered, reflected, dazzling.
Dominique Ambroise
January 2005
Translation : Mariette Kelley
download PDF
|
