Pierre Bourgault

"Everything stems from journeys on water." Pierre Bourgault

This statement enacts the vertiginous, joyful experiences that the artist Pierre Bourgault lives during his voyages on the vastness of the Saint-Laurent River. Everything stems from this ecstasy, this trance, from the pursuit of the infinite, the eternal, and the void for he, whose artistic research is founded on a passionate relationship nourished by his environment at the level of the water's surface.

"This 'drifting' by boat makes more obvious and manifests the importance of navigation in inspiring poetic process in situ, conceptual design, and lastly drawings and installations as a broader idea of what sculpture represents for Bourgault." Guy Sioui Durand

This spirited, fertile relationship produces a series of works in motion, in constant evolution, where the central theme is memory intrinsic to the communion with nature and its observation; "habitable sculptures", marine charts, cardinal landmarks, sound works, and more recently, abstract sculptures, formalize the corporal and emotional memory of the actual journey experienced on the river.

"The works of Bourgault maintain a degree of expectation or open-endedness, continually linking them to past or future creations, to tenacious, utopic projects in the imagination of an artist whose thoughts are in perpetual motion and who has an 'idealizing' vision of the place art need occupy in the world." Louise Dery

His first "habitable sculptures" were produced in the late 60s and the most popular one still juts out over the ocean today. Erected on the artist's land, it functions like a refuge for the wandering traveler. Evoking a new, utopic observation-post and built on blocs of sea salt, the "habitable sculpture" built here, now offers various perspectives on the works and is furnished only with a bunk bed suspended in emptiness. At the exhibition's entrance, a workbench is placed at visitors' disposal, enabling them to sculpt their own bloc of salt. Highlighting the artist's feeling of uncertainty during his voyages on the water and of solitude faced with his work, Bourgault places the visitor in the doubled stance of observer and creator.

Whereas Don Diego piloted Carlos Castaneda across the desert, dependant for weeks on the flight patterns of crows as his only navigation, and Richard Long traced a straight line in the landscape by repetitive walking (A line by walking, 1967), Pierre Bourgault spatializes the random trace of his multiple sensorial experiences through the use of abstract forms.

His marine charts, a form of unconscious and random writing, cast aside their points of reference only to deliver a decidedly abstract but animated drawing. Although some figurative elements, stripped bare, punctuate at times the dynamic energy of the installation, the line takes form and launches three-dimensionally. These new works by Pierre Bourgault attest to the progressive and radical migration of the artist towards abstraction.

Caroline Andrieux