« Travelling! The divine road! » Boris Chouvellon in the country of Montbazillac.

On a hill overlooking the Dordogne valley where the fog allows the vines to develop a particular fungus that feeds on the sunny grain and whose alchemy transforms the grapes into a velvety elixir; there is a castle with crenelated towers that preserves in its building the defensive signs as well as those of a relaxed residence in times of peace as it should be in the Renaissance of the middle of the 16th century. The owner of this building is a cooperative cellar of 48 winegrowers who, with the strength of an AOC created in 1936, bought the Château de Monbazillac in 1960 to make it its HQ and to perfect an image that is not quoted on the stock exchange just as its culture is reasoned. Since 2009, the association « les Rives de l’art » has been developing a program for a residency and a biennial event « EpHémères » extended to six other locations, offering artists the opportunity to meet the public in this southern Dordogne region. It takes care of the specific requests of the artists while the cultural agency of Dordogne takes care of the financing of the residences already in number of seven.

The invited artist is offered three months of residency, which can be spread out over the year, and a floor of the castle to propose a monographic exhibition at the end of his stay. In 2022, this kind of situation perfectly suited Boris Chouvellon, who wanted to unravel his practice, nourished here by an immersion in the rhythms of the pulsations of the territories, the traces, the clues that end up digging lines of desires in the landscape: « Traveling! The divine road! ».
Boris Chouvellon wanted to cross the seasons. Arriving during the grape harvest, he saw the plots of land become depopulated and the arrival of the snow arrive, making the château ghostly. This long time allowed the sculptor to collect clues that sometimes remain latent or give form. Signifying the obsolescence of a certain organization of rural life, appear the metal structures of the old scales to weigh the grapes which come to draw modules in the sky. The remains of a burned warehouse where abandoned goods slowly decay, evoke a dystopian diorama of an endless « third landscape ». The enormous cylindrical containers of the winery, the trucks with their mirror-polished tanks, but still discovering that after the vineyard, the main hirer is a powder factory set up for 1914-1918 here are the glittering armors and the powder that already the castle instills in all its ambiguity, between defensive and pleasure system. All these elements constitute a narrative that Boris Chouvellon’s sculptural and visual gesture puts into space in a place from which, through all the windows, one can see a horizon covering all the cardinal points. The first room on the first floor of the castle is dedicated to two large photographs (Tears valley, 2023) that return the source of the Garonne from the Golden Mountains to its confluence with the Garonne, the estuary, the mouth. The space of movement is suspended between a chairlift, a marker of the tourist industry, and a Seveso site with enormous circular tanks.

In the center, a gigantic silver mobile (Entropic Rock, 2023) diffuses energy by capturing outside light, a reminder of the light from the chrome of a suspended cistern, – « Petrol Blues, » a California sculpture made in 2019 (during a « Crusing on Empty » exhibition, Show Gallery, Los Angeles). From room to room, the works respond to each other, a photo gallery of invisibilized elements, an industrial door, a universal basic model, (Je te vois, 2023), for example, taken out of the public space and bearing the handwritten inscription tagged « je te vois » comes out of the photographic set presented on the wall to appear life-size as a « ready made » plucked from the heap of an archeological deposit of the everyday. These visual representations, like an unwinding of drifts, give an account of the angles and the backstage that the artist’s gaze has taken to better anchor his deconstruction/reconstruction of the motif where we find a vocabulary linked to brutalist architecture, that of metal and concrete, a world of modernity, the vernacular of trophies and cups mounted in endless columns (The Small Illusions), the movement of a sculpted form covered with mirrors that can only be identified with that of the globalized kebab (Everywhere is nowhere (Monbazillac). Other encounters, the glitter of the region, the red of the tomatoes spilled at the sauce factory nearby. In the tower, the water tower is overturned and ruined: larger than a model, La poudrerie des anges (2023), a sculpture scaled to the room as if uprooted from the landscape on a large red velvet cloth. This color matches those of the banners (Travelling, 2023) hung on long poles erected in front of the castle, towards the valley. Made of red car doors, one of which is black, stamped and folded, these flags with holes in them catch the wind, worn down by the entropy of symbols. 

Boris Chouvellon, « Travelling! The divine road » at Château de Montbazillac
Until June 25, 2023.
The flags (Travelling, 2023) participate in the biennial « ÉpHémères » until the end of the summer.
A text by Bruce Bégout accompanies Boris Chouvellon’s practice (forthcoming).

Discover more at www.lesrivesdelart.com

Entropic Rock, 2023, Tube métal, câbles, accastillages, peinture métallisée, treillis métallique, mortier, papier d’aluminiums, paillettes argentées, Dimension totale 350 cm x 350 cm (disques 100 et 200 cm de diamètre).

Entropic Rock, 2023, Tube métal, câbles, accastillages, peinture métallisée, treillis métallique, mortier, papier d’aluminiums, paillettes argentées, Dimension totale 350 cm x 350 cm (disques 100 et 200 cm de diamètre).

Je te vois, 2023 , Graffiti sur porte en bois trouvée dans le hangar d’un magasin de décoration incendié, ajout de paillettes argentées,Dimension H 200 cm L 90 cm P 5cm.

La poudrière des Anges, 2023, Fer à béton, mortier, Dimension H 120 cm Diamètre 60 cm.

The Small Illusions, 2008-2023, Colonnes composées de trophées, Hauteur 450 cm x 15 cm diamètre.

 

Travelling, 2023, Portières de voitures, mats métalliques, Dimension H 6,50 m  L 1,50 m P 20 cm.

Travelling, 2023, Portières de voitures, mats métalliques, Dimension H 6,50 m  L 1,50 m P 20 cm.

Travelling, 2023, Portières de voitures, mats métalliques, Dimension H 6,50 m  L 1,50 m P 20 cm.

Vulcano, 2014-2023, Pneus, machine à barbe-à-papa activée avec du sucre, Dimension variable.

 

Boris Chouvellon  photographe, (série photographique), 2023, Photographie imprimée sur papier Arches Aquarelle et encadrée, Dimension 30X30 cm.