2023 | NICOLAS LACHANCE - Entreprise
MONTREAL
March 16 - Mai 13, 2023 
Opening: Thursday, March 16, 2023, 5:00 pm - 7:00 pm.

The work of Nicolas Lachance draws us deep into the realm of contemplation and confrontation, in which a nuanced understanding of the relationship between the technical image and power is expressed. Entreprise presents new paintings whose singularities simultaneously connect them all to the interwoven affinity between image and ideology.  

Acting as a vehicle for the dissemination of ‘the ethical,’ a crucial function in the development of capitalism, images have always influenced how we view and value the world around us. The circulation of information by means of the printing press, a technology that allowed for the mass production and distribution of images, was an instigator for the creation of visual material that could be accessed by a large audience. In this sense, the image began to function as a form of externalized memory, allowing people to transmit and access visual information that transcended individual experiences. If the historical period of the Protestant Reformation was faced with moral questions, the industrial revolutions of the past had to instead negotiate a set of ethical dilemmas. 

From violent imagery to the uncontrollable propagation of images, a chasm of confusion has resulted from the cultural shifts brought on by these historical landmarks. Through the act of appropriating and reframing artworks printed before the advent of Gutenberg's letterpress in the context of the Protestant Reformation, Lachance investigates the various roles that images play in shaping our perception of the late Middle Ages. Early mass-produced images presented an opportunity to democratize knowledge and to liberate people from the constraints of traditional modes of thought, allowing them to access information without the imposed mediation of an elite. On the other hand, the power dynamics involved in the dissemination of images are never disinterested in nature, but are instead representative of deeply entrenched power structures and social hierarchies. The reformers worked in close collaboration with like-minded artists sympathetic to their ideas; these artists even monopolized their studios to the service of their ends. Chimera, demons, scatology, murder and satirical blasphemy appeared in the presses as illustrations of the theses forwarded by the reformers.  

The use of cropping in the works Detail from Sabbath, Unknown, woodcut, approx 1522; Detail from Revelation of St John; Vision of the Seven Candlesticks, Lucas Cranach, woodcut, 1529; and Sans titre, invites the viewer to step closer and carefully observe. This sense of intimacy facilitates a new space for the exercise of individual interpretation. The act of cropping can also be seen as a deliberate attempt to direct, control and manipulate how one perceives the image and, by extension, the part of the past that it represents. In this sense, Lachance’s cropped images can be interpreted as a form of violence, as their selective pictorial space by necessity erases and obscures elements of the original image. This violent gesture allows the artist to perpetuate, and at the same time question, the dominant power structures embedded in the images. A single fragment is extracted from the whole; the wider context evades our view. 

In his work, Lachance invites us to contemplate painting as a subversive gesture that is carnal in nature. Images can not only be tools of domination but also sites of resistance. As he reframes our understanding of how technical images can have a significant impact in shaping our collective memory, his approach takes cues from the impregnable artifacts of corporate culture. The three large scale paintings, Duke-Price Power and Co. Ltd., Isle Maligne Station, 1925; Les établissements sanitaires, TG Cité industrielle, 1917; and Barrage, TG., 1921 employ models representing industrial projects in untouched, wild areas as source material. Lachance’s paintings, however, do not show any of the infrastructures depicted in the models. Erased from their compositional contexts, the specter of potentiality vanishes as well. The notion of ruin is here bypassed in favour of a raw topology referring only to its "own time": that is, to geological time. The composition of each work was made by enlarging and then dividing and printing a source image into multiple letter-size sheets of paper. The artist’s labour is registered through the ghosts of his process, each segment painstakingly painted onto the canvas, one by one, recomposing the fractured image by syncing and reconciling manual and mechanical means.  

The work presented in Entreprise highlights the paradoxical nature of images in their function as both a source of persuasion and of defiance. If the Scriptures have been the subject of a feud instigated by the Reformers, printed images have been their pivotal medium. The role of erasure and reframing in the production of Lachance's recent paintings offers a poetic perspective on the mechanisms of circulation and use involved in both images and the written word.

-Jérôme Nadea