Troubling the gaze. Guillaume Lachapelle and Simon Bilodeau at Palazzo Bembo

For the 56th Venice Biennale, the Global Art Affairs Foundation invited Guillaume Lachapelle and Simon Bilodeau to participate in the group exhibition Personal Structures – Crossing Borders. Fast becoming one of the most important of the Biennale’s Collateral Events program, this exhibition is the result of a project that Dutch artist Rene Rietmeyer launched in 2002 in order to encourage encounters and exchanges among artists from around the world. The project is ironically named after the emblematic exhibition Primary Structures, held at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1966, during which minimalist artists imposed their credo of an objective art free of any trace of manual labour. Rietmeyer’s initiative instead gives pride of place to artists with distinctly subjective practices and singular approaches. Since 2007, activities in Personal Structures have been articulated around the themes of time, space, and existence. Despite the four symposia devoted to the project — Time (Amsterdam, 2007), Existence (Tokyo, 2008), Space (New York, 2009), and Time – Space – Existence (Venice, 2009) — no specific editorial perspective has emerged.1 1  - Communications related to these symposia are brought together in Personal Structures: TIME – SPACE – EXISTENCE, s.l., Global Art Affairs Foundation, 2009. In 2011, after exhibitions and symposia held in Asia, Europe, and North America, the project put down roots in Venice. Among the artists participating in the event this year are Carl Andre, Bruce Barber, Daniel Buren, herman de vries, Richard Long, Robert Mangold, François Morellet, Hermann Nitsch, Yoko Ono, and Lawrence Weiner. This year, as with previous editions, the exhibition will be held at Palazzo Bembo, where Lachapelle and Bilodeau will share a space in which they intend to showcase a few of their recent productions revolving around the Personal Structures themes.

Modelling a World

For a dozen years or so, Lachapelle has been producing miniatures characterized by an attention to detail, highly precise renditions, and meticulous execution. First giving form to small figures and objects, their iconography sometimes tinged by the surreal, he then dwelled on the representation of architectural elements or the creation of truly autonomous worlds. The use of 3D printing also lends his works an impersonal and disquieting quality. He constantly strives to take advantage of the exhibition set-up, often playing with light sources and various display devices.