GWENAËL BÉLANGER - BREAKDOWN

GWENAËL BÉLANGER - BREAKDOWN

Room 2

Gwenaël Bélanger

BREAKDOWN

EXHIBITION /
MARCH 14 TO APRIL 20, 2013

Conceived as a follow-up to his photographic project 100, rue Blainville Ouest (2009), Breakdown (2008-2013), a recent work by Gwenaël Bélanger, is an animated 3D short showing in a single take of a house in free-fall, disintegrating along its way, its origin unknown. Since 2003, Bélanger has experimented with the parameters of gravity, among other themes, in order to question the image’s status, its relationship to time, movement, narration, and off-camera. More specifically, the relationship this latter element has with reality; 3D modeling and animation being a demanding process consisting in producing credible situations as realistically as possible. While video and photography are tools that capture reality, the medium chosen here by the artist has only a passing link to the universe he attempts to evoke by creating it from scratch. As techniques increasingly used in the film and advertising industries, 3D modeling and animation create strong images that heighten the imagination while titillating our expectations, although here they are subverted from their anticipated spectacle, since the scene’s climax, the veritable apotheosis of the sequence, is continuously deferred. In effect, contrary to the work Le Tournis (2008), where the silent fall of mirrors allowed us to imagine their impact, causing a veritable explosion of the image in a noisy crash, Breakdown allows us to hear the moment of falling, characterized by air friction that causes the progressive disintegration of the house, disappearing without ever reaching the ground.
 

Having been acquainted with his photo series or videos where the captured event, while seemingly improbable, did in fact take place – I refer here to the piece Le Grand Fatras (2005), where what could pass as the contents of an apartment (dryer, piano, bicycle, armchair) literally fall from the sky – the artist plays here with the viewer’s gullibility, fooled for a moment before questioning the reality of the scenario: a house in free-fall, traversing a blue sky on an otherwise calm and sunny day. Likely, it would take a formidable storm, a devastating tornado like the one in the opening scene of The Wizard of Oz, for this situation to occur. If the gradual stripping of the image remains plausible, this means a real scenario articulating the step-by-step disintegration of a house due to this potential chain of events was meticulously written. Vast research was conducted, including viewing videos on the experience of gliding, to be able to imagine how mass as imposing as a house would react and move through the air during its fall. Since it is impossible to truly verify the response of this object under these circumstances, the realistic nature of the video rests solely on the ability of the artist to render it. And the results are realistic. Through the use of 3D modeling and animation techniques, Bélanger plays with the notion that the line between reality and fiction is sometimes so thin that in ads or films that use it, we are surely being had.

Anne Marie St-Jean Aubre

Gwenaël Bélanger would like to thank all the team at Couleur.tv, particularly Jean-François Gauthier and Francis Gélinas, le Conseil des arts et lettres du Québec, Geneviève Matteau, Stéphane Beaudet and the team at Clark.