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5 Artworks
Favorites of
Julien Abadie
Recently named publisher of Vie des Arts magazine, Julien Abadie has led several professional lives. Successively a journalist covering cinema, sports, economics and even the military, over the years he has acquired solid skills in digital strategies. He has supported and propelled transitions for media such as Equidia in France and Les Affaires in Québec. He has also worked for the Siletnale and Adviso web agencies.
But his primary passion remains art criticism in general and film criticism in particular, with a particular zest for niche films. His articles can be found in magazines such as Chronicart, Vertigo, Carbone, Voir, and now Vie des Arts. In addition, Mr. Abadie has collaborated on two collective publications: Paul Verhoeven, Total Spectacle (published by Playlist Society) and John McTiernan, Cinéma Total (forthcoming from Éditions Aedon). His first individual publication is to appear in 2020 and will be titled: Speed Racer, les Wachowski à la lumière de la vitesse.
To visit the website click here : Vie des arts
Michel De Broin
“This monumental sculpture seems to hide the same mystery as Escher’s optical illusions. Your eyes shift, unable to figure out where to start, and just when you think you’ve understood the piece, it quickly escapes you. But the essential is elsewhere. The Révolutions staircase, first and foremost, follows the same trajectory that paralyzes our era: an infinite loop, a swirling immobility. What is involved here isn’t really a movement; it’s a failed ascension, a roundabout walk, a tautological progression, a revolution in the gyratory sense. It’s no small accomplishment to be able to stop passersby, catching them exactly where they are: in this age of inertia.”
Linda Covit
“I am fascinated by this piece, which I discovered purely by chance, one very cold day when I decided to explore Montréal’s edges. The snow-covered pier in Lachine was completely deserted. My only companions were the three monolithic silhouettes of Theatre for Sky Bloc. From the granite bench that accompanies them, I found that they added something vertical to the supreme horizontality of lac Saint-Louis and the grey sky. I couldn’t say whether this was due to the elegant way they punctuated the landscape, or to the poetry of their clouds which seemed to float between water and air, but this inalterable trio gave off a mixture of tranquility, respiration and permanence.”
David Altmejd
“I don’t remember discovering in any other Canadian art of the last decade pieces that radiate such a remarkable power as this one by David Altmejd. His mutant, burgeoning sculptures are so many incarnations of the hybrid horizon which seems to be where Homo sapiens is heading. Appearing to be more sapient than his other work, The Eye is based on the same logic: it forms a bridge between Altmejd’s art and that of the past. It impregnates the classical sculptural form to beget a composite, mythical mutant. What is most surprising is that a reassuring energy circulates through the swelling forms of this disembowelled Icarus. It’s as if its fundamentally changing character expresses the promise of constant renewal, a blooming that always starts anew. The fact it’s located at the entrance of a museum transforms the sculpture into a quasi-manifesto: art is alive and shall always be so.
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Patrick Coutu
“Produced during the Edo period, Hokusai’s Great Wave off Kanagawa is what is called an ukiyo-e in Japanese: a picture of the floating world. This vitalist art exudes an indefinable, primordial energy, a spiritual and mysterious breath that seems to obey laws other than those that direct the world. What is interesting about Patrick Coutu’s Vague is that it directs us to that traditional art, while reversing its philosophical proposition. Scrupulously designed according to the proportions of the Golden Mean, comprised of an assembly of + and - signs, encompassing three dimensions although ukiyo-e art sought flatness. This sculpture is an attempt to digitize the natural movement of things, the symbolic subjection of its forms to the mathematical forces that surround it. Depending on your mood, you can read into it the structural perfection of Mother Nature, or a commentary on the implacable rationalization which will henceforth command our relationship to the world.”
Antony Gormley
“Digital beings are today’s golems: by etching a few algorithmic instructions in them, we give them an existence. Watching them come to life with terrifying precision, we are reminded of our own situation. We are living beings who have learned so well how to create life out of nothing—even something as dead as computer codes—that from now on we’ll find it hard to distinguish what differentiates us, not from life, but, specifically from the inanimate. In the giant pixels that form this sculpture, should we read the birth of the first technological singularity, or the approaching end of our own?”