I stilled vertigoes

... I wrote down silences, nights, I wrote down that which could not be said.
I stilled vertigoes. (Arthur Rimbaud, A Season in Hell)

A dialogue between two poles of today’s artistic practice

An artist is always subject to a variety of vertigoes. He seeks equilibrium on the edge of what he perceives beyond his own being and on which he needs to shed light.

Today’s art appropriates a wide range of characteristics relative to substance as well as to form. Artists develop simple or excessive ways to give a name to the world in which they live.

Essentially, the 30th anniversary of the International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul will highlight two antipodal attitudes, two different approaches to creation which are hallmarks of today’s art. To that end, the artists selected will be working at two opposite poles of today’s artistic practice.

Pole one

Pole one describes a practice which states sparse proposals. In this instance, vertigo refers to a certain concept of the vacuum and to the perception of this concept through works whose reading more or less points to universality by always emphasizing the notions of “less” and of “next to nothing”. Here, the experimentation and fabrication strategies are in full view and, often, present scant complexity. Proposals are then monochromic. They reach for the sublime, employ commonplace materials, or make use of primal manipulations that sometimes produce disarming results.

Pole two

The second pole is characterised by fullness, bushiness and overflow.

Overflow is not the subject. Overflow, excess are the matrices for the work and give meaning to a vertigo where the eyes do not know where to set, because signs, materials, colours are everywhere and haphazardly assembled. The proposals are “generous”. They are beyond measure and calculation. They are often autobiographical and mainly expressionistic. They pull us into a universe, a cosmogony of intermingled signs where essentials appear everywhere and nowhere in particular.

Invitation to artists

The 30th anniversary of the International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie-Saint-Paul will thus offer a bountiful dialogue between artists whose practices correspond to one or the other of these two approaches.

We look forward to receiving proposals that affirm an eloquent commitment to one of these two poles of creative endeavour in today’s art. We view these poles as concrete points of reference and precise boundaries leading to a better understanding of the world in which we live.

Is it not today — and has it not been in times past — the very first mission of any genuine artistic commitment?