In the Studio with Vincent Larouche
INTERVIEW
Vincent Larouche in his studio, Montreal, 2020
What have you been working on this fall?
Fall has been busy. I’ve recently opened a solo exhibition, Ocelle, curated by Caroline Andrieux at the Fonderie Darling in Montreal that engages with contemporary and historical iconography and its relationship to different regimes of violence. I am also in the process of developing a solo exhibition for Interstate Projects in Brooklyn that is scheduled to open early winter 2021. Aside from that, last week I relocated my studio to the very northern part of the city, here in Montreal, and it has so far been very good for the work as I am in the middle of other projects for later in 2021 and needed more space.
Your work engages with the social impact of technology, which is depicted using the traditional and “slow” medium of oil paint. Is this a significant relationship?
Yes and No. Oil paint plays a rich, yet complex role in the history of representational technologies. By the height of the Renaissance, oil painting had almost completely replaced the use of tempera paints in the majority of Europe, and by the late 19th century the need for painting as a representational technology was being challenged with the appearance of the first Kodak film rolls and the widespread popularity of amateur photography. Parallel to this in the 15th century, Johannes Gutenberg’s printing press allowed for an ever increasingly rapid and exponential dissemination of information; Martin Luther is credited as being the first ‘’Best Selling Author’’ which sums up the role of the Gutenberg press in the Protestant Reformation. Following this logic, the work in the show Study of a HP Deskjet Printer, 2020 aims at exploring and tracing parallels between historically important paradigm shifts in technological advancements.
The characters in your paintings are taken from various online sources and reworked into vignettes about contemporary visual culture. Could you discuss this further and are these characters also in dialogue with art historical imagery?
I like to think that I work in a kind of fan fiction methodology. A lot of the source material I use, digital or not, comes from spaces in which I have a certain engagement. That methodology is only furthered by the fact that screen space neutralizes, in complex ways, the act of seeing that democratizes visual media and strips obvious affects from the latter. Like any art historical imagery of significance, the visual media that will resist or sustain the effect of time will continue to operate because it acts as a concentrate of ideologies. That is how the image operates, it does something that discourse cannot do. We just have to refer to the era of Byzantine Iconoclasm to understand how powerfully images operate within societies, in and out of the different economies that compose it.
2019 World Cup Solo Finals refers to the story of a 16 year old gamer called “Bugha” who last year won $3 million through the video game Fortnite. Could you discuss your interest in this story and how this is connected to your own role as a gamer?
It is only connected with my role as a gamer in the sense that I am a gamer and my social media feeds me updates from various gaming media news outlets. But the event was so big that mainstream media was all over it. The video game Industry has seen a steady growth in its revenue over the last 20 years and the lockdowns due to Covid-19 have only cemented its sustainability within the various sectors making up the entertainment economy. In 2018, the global video games market was valued at around $134.9bn. What interested me with this work was to explore how words like ‘’Athlete’’ and ‘’Sports’’ are transgressing their historically associated models with the advent of large scale Esports conventions and competitions. In other words, there’s a mutation in our understanding of what an ‘’Athlete’’ is. Gaming athletes function within business models that are very similar to the ones in place in the NBA, the NHL or the NFL with coaches, teams, corporate sponsorship, spectatorship and training.
The This Sacred Vessel exhibition series has focused on the continued relevance of contemporary painting. Can you discuss why painting in the age of networked society remains vital?
I can’t speak with much authority to that. I think that there’s an expanding gap between what society considers cultural production, what the market demands and the objects that are made every day in artist’s studios (all mediums combined). I like to believe that we are still trying to decipher the cryptic nature of painting’s sustainability as a practice, but I could be wrong.
In our current exhibition your work is shown alongside Walter Robinson, an important figure in the Pictures Generation school. Can you discuss how artists from the Pictures Generation have influenced your work?
They laid, I feel, the groundwork for thinking critically through mass media and representational imagery in relationship to making ‘’art’’ objects. The diverse methodologies and stylistic heterogeneity of their output has results in a densely weaved field of study.