The summer of 2012 has been especially busy at Galerie Trois Points. Behind the closed doors, the gallery space has been completely revamped, doubling the exhibition spaces. It is therefore with great pleasure that we inaugurate this brand new space with the impressive new body of works from the Montreal-based artist Sylvain Bouthillette.

This latest production continues to question themes important to the artist : spirituality, history of art – painting – legacy,  musical influence, materiality of the medium. The artist works through repetition of a same pattern, the pieces being continually in a state ofnon-finito. Bouthillette, “focused, repeatidly battles with a pictorial problem” and uses “all methods of incompleteness, voluntary caused accident and the risk to mess on which his works are invariably built.[1]”

If the influence of music – sound – is generally present in Bouthillette’ practice, it gives here its title to the exhibition: 15HERTZ,  “a frequency though inaudible yet perceptible enough by our body to move us.” As Anne-Marie Ninacs states in the opuscule that accompanies the exhibition, “this underlying sound effect, underground, is no stranger to most of the music he listens in loop while working – jazz, reggae, dub – which all have a similar quality of “endless continuity”.”

The skull partern is recurrent in the work of Bouthillette, a memento mori strongly connoted in art history, a reminder of the impermanence of all things, bringing one back to his own mortality. As Ninacs states, “with emphasizing on this classical representation on the futility of earthy life, it is a meditation on vacuity that Bouthillette seems to stimulate”, a spiritual dimension closely linked to his Buddhist practice.

Sylvain Bouthillette holds a MFA from Concordia University, where he currently teaches painting. He has exhibited widely in Quebec, Canada and abroad, in Reims (France), Basel (Switzerland), the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal. The Musée régional de Rimouski and the Centre Saint-Hyacinthe Expression jointly organized a major exhibition of the artist’s work that has traveled across Canada between 2006 and 2008. His work is widely represented in various private and museum collections, including the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Caisse de dépôt et de placement du Québec, Cirque du Soleil, National Bank of Canada, Loto-Québec and Hydro-Québec.

[1] Anne-Marie NINACS, Absorption–Émission  in “SYLVAIN BOUTHILLETTE : 15HERTZ”, Montréal, Galerie Trois Points, 2012 (opuscule). Graphic design Simon Rivest. All references refer to this text.

Press release