Patrick Bernatchez
"Patrick Bernatchez" by Jacob Wren, Fall 2008, p. 148
A man sits alone in his car at night, eating a hamburger and then casually smoking a cigarette as the camera slowly and gracefully travels around the vehicle. He is apparently oblivious to the fact that the car is rapidly filling up with water. The camera continues to circle the car until it is completely filled. This is Patrick Bernatchez’s 10-minute video Chrysalide, the centre-piece of his show at SKOL, which also features numerous drawings, a musical composition and an impressive painting etched on a mirror.
The dystopian, ennui-laden mood of the show lends an underlying sense of dread to its theme of transformation. The work in the show, which was first presented as a series of sporadic, short-term exhibitions in the Fashion Plaza, the commercial building where Bernatchez has his studio, also takes this building as its setting and theme. One can easily imagine nights during which the artist sat alone in his studio— thinking too much about the barely lit, deserted streets that surrounded him—in a neighbourhood, Mile End, that is rapidly being transformed by gentrification of every stripe.
The musical piece Fashion Plaza Nights: 12 Compositions for 2 Pianos began with a series of late-night exterior photos of the Fashion Plaza that documented the patterning of its lit-up windows. These patterns were then digitally adapted into a composition for MIDI piano. In the gallery, an image of the building at night is accompanied by a transcription and recording of the musical score. This music resonates with modernist and 12-tone composition, and the fact that it was created by a carefully crafted system, as a transformation of data provided by the building itself, gives the experience of listening an added ambiguity.
Bernatchez’s biography mentions the fact that he is self-taught, and it perhaps tells us something about our current cultural context that “self-taught” here is associated with a strong emphasis on skill and craft. All of these works are beautifully made and foreground their own precision and efficacy. This is an alternative Gothic, occasionally brushing up against the clichés of the genre (some of the drawings might not be out of place on the cover of a black-metal CD) but for the most part remaining strange and surprising enough to avoid such traps.
The appearance of what feels like a sincere expression of apocalyptic thoughts and impulses in a contemporary-art context that so often focuses on dry conceptualism or ironic distance has an undeniable impact. Clearly Patrick Bernatchez is charting his own course.
Subscribe to Canadian Art today and save 30% off the newstand price.
