Rewind: Michel Goulet
Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, Montreal
Michel Goulet's whimsical chairs have become his artistic signature. On some you may manage to sit, while others are knocked over and lying down. Some have twisted strips of metal welded to their surfaces. Goulet's chair installations define intimate urban space in places such as Place Roy, in the heart of Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal, and Le Jardin des curiosités, in Lyon, France.
Goulet's chair fantasies create a sense of visual strain, a hint of a universe that is curiously confused. Don't, however, take the chairs at face value. His artistic demeanour is anything but confused. This survey of the sculptor's career shows a rational, artistic universe, with rigorous strategies that balance a keen sense of matter with a gregarious sense of humour. Goulet, who has practised sculpture, installation and public art, has had numerous exhibitions in Canada and abroad.
The implicit poetry of everyday objects is at the heart of his art. In Opportune Encounters (1996), a wheelbarrow is welded to a plate of sheet metal leaning against a wall. In Mind Mines (1996), a chair is propped on a sheet-metal table covering. In Gravity Round (1994), rotary saw blades bristling with menacing teeth have water taps, metal spoons and miniature vise grips screwed to the wheels. This installation conjures a hint of Dada. Yet in spite of the gleaming steel teeth, this sculpture doesn't feel sinister. It has a bit of the frivolous, nonsense quality of an Agatha Christie mystery novel. In the installation Assembly (1987), a roomful of metal chairs decked with pieces of scrap iron faces a table piled with a jigsaw puzzle that looks like a map of the world. In this travesty of a classroom, boredom has taken over. World history may be on its last legs, the artist seems to hint, and it's all about entropy and confusion.
Goulet's daydreams made with mundane objects advocate freedom from being a prisoner of form and function. They dare the viewer to unlock his imagination to aesthetic potential beyond the self-evident. Goulet is interested in the interaction between concept and process: "I want to let projects be enlivened by finds, discoveries, events," he explains. In a virtual world, Goulet revels in the materiality of things. By scraping, embossing, reshaping industrially produced surfaces, he probes the matter behind the commercial artifact. The forest-like cluster of slender, rusting metal rods in Eden-Garden-End (2004) reveals a new-found restraint, poetic spareness in an upward sweep.
Spring 2005
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