This year, La BF15 suggests for each exhibition a dialogue between two artists. Here, in d'une seconde majeure ou mineure (of a major or minor second), the works of Julie Béna and Dominique Blais meet.
As a prologue, Julie Béna presents Elisabeth II. In each window, a device made up of motorised blinds subtly influences the interior light by a rotary movement. As a way of introduction, this work then carries out a shift between day and night, between the gloaming and the murk.
Inside, Dominique Blais's installation invites the visitor to wander in a sound landscape through an archipelago of sandstone records. Started in 2008, Sans titre (Les Disques) (Untitled - The Records) is spread for the first time on the scale of the entire exhibition space. The terra cotta circles are spread for the majority on the ground while some of them are suspended to engines and brush against the static elements. A game of subtle harmonic frictions is created, like a “hypnotic ballet”, a sound poem in random stanzas.
On the wall, four hard copies show us ghostly traces produced by the arrangement of lit candles in front of a camera obscura. At the foot of each copy, Dominique Blais has laid a bronze sculpture made with the lost wax technique. It is the residual shape of the candles used to produce the photographic image. Entitled Ring, this piece refers to Wagner's opera tetralogy The Ring of the Nibelung. Lasting almost 15 hours, this work breaks up into a prologue and three days. For each opera, the artist has lit a candle in front of a pinhole with the aim of exposing photosensitive paper to the effective duration of the representation. The revealed image (in negative format) functions like the abstract testimony of the flow of time relating to the presence of musical work.
With La Disparition (The Disappearance), Dominique Blais works with Georges Pérec's eponymous novel. Following this operation, the reading of the book is not however affected. Handling generates neither dysfunction, nor modification of meaning. One could even consider that the public, plunged in its reading, does not (or tardily) perceive the modification that was carried out.
For Le paysage est magnifique (The landscape is magnificent), Julie Béna suggests a window using only a simple aluminium tube equipped with a chain. At the edge of interior and exterior, she sent us back to all the rooms, which here, by their minor presences reveal a landscape with major nuances