dArt International Magazine

by Emese Krunak-Hajagos

Jean-François Bouchard’s exhibition Exile from Babylon at Arsenal Contemporary Art is part of Toronto’s Scotiabank CONTACT Photography Festival. CONTACT is the largest photography festival in the world, showcasing more than 180 exhibitions in the GTA from May to August.

In this solo show, Montreal-born, New York City-based artist Jean-François Bouchard documents a squatters’ camp in the Sonoran Desert in California. People who live here reject modern American society – Babylon as they call it – and are looking for alternative ways of survival in the face of homelessness and addiction, escaping the legal system or pursing libertarian ideals. They live in a very unfriendly land without running water, electricity or garbage removal in tents, shanties, shipping containers, crumbling recreational vehicles and even dens dug into the ground. They know each other by nicknames only, and appear and disappear under strange circumstances. Their search for fulfillment and absolute freedom comes at the cost of great personal sacrifice.

The seemingly straightforward narrative is misleading as the photographs are challenging. The first few images that depict the community in this vastly empty landscape in daylight, are very bright, even blinding as they are presented in lightboxes. These pieces are almost white because of the extreme heat and the absence of any vegetation. The barren land has a few dying trees and the residents are wandering, mostly by themselves or with dogs, seemingly as wild as their owners, surrounded by debris – creating a post-apocalyptic scene. These people’s lives are no longer supported or even tolerated by society, so they are forced to live on the periphery. The photographs are brutally true – but the documentation ends here.

The rest of the photographs in the larger section of the exhibition, depict trees at night – and Bouchard abandons documentation and continues telling the story of the cruel reality metaphorically. The contrast of the bright daylight images and the darkness of the night shots is very dramatic. These mostly dying trees, decorated with thrown out objects and debris that either residents or the harsh desert wind have placed around them and on their branches, create ugly – sometimes even creepy – images that are still beautiful. The metamorphosis trees go through in the night is indeed magical and mesmerizing. What we look at are no longer dying trees with bare branches and useless objects or garbage around them. Everything changes into something different, like in a fairy tale, the creepy becomes eerie.

These dying trees become mystical at night, under the magic touch of sunset or twilight, the starry or stormy sky or the total darkness. Because of the light box technology, both the strong orange of the sunset and the shiny brightness of the stars catch our eyes and for a moment we enjoy their peace. In Tree of Life #1 blue, a night colour, highlights the tree and the rugs flying in the wind. The atmosphere is sad and lonely juxtaposed against the rather beautiful sunset. In Tree of Life #2 the artist lights the tree in white, that reminds us of the pureness of snow. It is already night and the stars are coming up, while the dying sunset lingers on the horizon. Trees always tell us a story about many things. This is an old tree having lived a harsh life in the desert, heavily abused by the strong winds and burdened with debris. It has been badly treated by both nature and humans. A hard life, much like that of the people there.

The absence of people is important in these photographs as the trees are the focal points. Tree of Life #9 is a little bit different with the addition of an elegant cupboard in front of the tree that somewhat modifies the atmosphere. It seems to be twilight; we can see stars but the sky is not dark and a little orange light of sunset lingers. The light coming from the front lights up only the top of the tree but strongly reflects off the glass doors of the cupboard. Where did this furniture come from? Although it has seen better days, it is beautifully crafted and antique. How did it get here and who left it? Surely, like the people who live here, it didn’t deserve this terrible fate.

Trees are very important creatures both in our lives and in myths. We usually associate trees with natural beauty, relaxation, peace — their fresh air nurtures us. In mythology they have a more complex meaning. Some tribes considered them sacred, and even looked on them as gods. They believed that trees could tell stories, see into the future and cause miracles. Old Celtic legends talk about putting a priest in a young tree so the trunk enclosed him in time and fed him with its syrup. The priest became part of the tree, spoke for the tree, creating a sacred communication between nature and human. And, of course, there is the Tree of Life, the symbol of every living thing.

It is also a scientific fact now that trees have a strong communication system and support each other in difficult times, be it natural disaster or illness (Susanne Simard: Finding the Mother Tree, Penguin Random House, 2021). The death of a tree indicates something has gone wrong in their community.

In Bouchard’s photograph the Tree of Life #6, the tree is dead. Similarly, the people living in the Sonora Desert are as good as dead to the American society.

Images are courtesy of the artist and Arsenal Contemporary Art Toronto

by John Mendelsohn

New York has a rare opportunity to see the work of the Italian modernist Bice Lazzari (1900-1981). The Mark & The Measure, the title of the exhibition at kaufmann repetto, organized with Richard Saltoun Gallery, captures the essential elements of Lazzari’s art – an intimate touch and an intuitive sense of visual structure. Together they combine to create works of unusual delicacy and power, animated by a musical pulse and emotive overtones. Over time, Lazzari’s abstract work evolved from gestural paintings, to strongly material pieces, to rhythmic, minimalist statements.

Lazzari wrote, “In paintings, I love light, space, rigor, structure, synthesis … and a little poetry.” The work in this survey exhibition, spanning the last four decades of her career, displays all of these qualities, and a pervasive, personal sense of mystery. This feeling is conveyed in the title of Laura Cherubini’s essay, Bice Lazzari: The Inner Life of Signs. In her essay, Cherubini points to specific influences on the artist’s work, and to a “lucid and epiphanic condensation of memory” (quoting Marisa Vescovo), that her work embodies.

Among the memories that shaped Lazzari’s paintings are her years working in the applied arts of weaving, textiles, mosaics, and murals, collaborating with Italian architects and designers. This work liberated Lazzari from her early training in figurative painting, opening her to the possibilities of geometric design and abstraction. The creation of continuous visual fields and an awareness that art was one with architectural space would go on to inform her paintings. Particularly resonant of this period is Lazzari’s Untitled from 1949 (the titles are translated from the Italian), a minimalist grid in deep red and black tempera on paper.

Beginning in the 1950s, Lazzari was able to devote herself to painting, first to geometric abstraction and then to gestural works, such as Night Writing, a storm of agitated, slashing strokes. Collage 1, with its blocky, emphatic forms and raw texture seems informed by both the “matter painting” and angst of post-war Italy’s Informalism.

Lazzari was born in Venice in 1900, where she studied the violin as a child. She moved to Rome in 1935, where she lived for the next five decades. Music’s ongoing influence emerged after a period of crisis, in the new direction Lazzari embarked on in 1964. There is a sense of fugitive feeling embedded in the physical surfaces of these works, such as Testimony, an atmosphere of tonalities that emerge from the surface of tempera, glue, and sand on canvas.

Similarly, in the powerful Sequence 3, a series of seven dark lines recede in perspective, suspended in a field of striations, that itself hovers like a vignette in a dream. The effect is that of an existential declaration of both individual agency and enveloping impermanence.

From the late 1960s, until the end of her life, Lazzari’s work incorporated the structural, the musical, and the lightness of material form in works that are by turn spare and intense, minimal and maximal. Untitled from 1967, paradoxically dense and subtle, is a dark, minimally woven field with extremely fine lines of lighter weft, divided into three columns by two warp lines in red and white.

In Untitled (Q-435) from 1972-73, dark space is traversed by tonal bands, the lightest of which is demarcated by a sequence of light and bold backslashes and dashes, alternating with blocks of emptiness. It is unaccountably moving, like a message in transit, sent out in the night, with and without hope of being heard.

Acrylic no. 6 from 1975 is both like the score and the playing of a musical composition, whose notes are fine and finer lines in black and red, shivering with the slight vibrato of the artist’s hand. A strict sequence is established, and then interrupted by two small, surprising anomalies that resonate in a vast white silence.

As Bice Lazzari wrote, “everything that moves in space is measurement and poetry. Painting searches in signs and color for the rhythm of these two forces, aiding and noting their fusion.”

Bice Lazzari: The Mark & The Measure (Selected Works from 1939-1978): kaufmann repetto, 55 Walker St., New York – May 12-June 17, 2023