Gilles Mihalcean:<\/strong> Six thin slices, I tell the butcher. The flat, square package he gives me doesn\u2019t resemble a pig in any respect and yet, as soon as I stick the slices in the bun with mustard, cheese, and lettuce, it really starts to take shape and work in piggy ways.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The same goes for my sculptures. I would say that cutting is the most important action; it\u2019s the basis of constructing. When I cut into an object\u2019s recognizable form, everything appears and disappears at the same time. And the more I cut, the more I open up, the more I share. Instead of imposing ideas, I liberate pieces of the indescribable experience of the rigid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, the concept of the sculpted object is based on the notion that sculpture has no object, doesn\u2019t show anything, and, most importantly, that we shouldn\u2019t try to see it. Sculpture can only be penetrating; it can only be a matter of the body. Le bouton<\/em> combines, in its own way, pieces of seemingly unrelated objects, taken from all over the place for strictly automatic and non-projective reasons, pieces that I picked up straight from my country\u2019s I-don\u2019t-know-what-to-do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Gilles$
Gilles Mihalcean<\/strong>
Le bouton<\/em>, 2024.
Photos: Suzelle Levasseur, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
Charles Guilbert :<\/strong> At La Place Commune caf\u00e9, the animated paleoanthropologist Michelle Drapeau tells us about bipedalism, the fundamental characteristic that distinguishes human beings from apes.^{1<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 1 <\/a> - Michelle Drapeau has published 27 caract\u00e9ristiques humaines fa\u00e7onn\u00e9es par l\u2019\u00e9volution<\/em> (Montr\u00e9al: Les Heures bleues, 2021).<\/span> She lists the morphological transformations that made this possible, particularly the opening and narrowing of the pelvis, the strengthening of the gluteus muscles, the inclination of the femur toward the knee, and the protrusion of the foramen magnum (the big hole in the occipital bone), which means that the head is balanced on top of the spine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think that our fate as human beings is essentially sculptural. Haven\u2019t I often heard you say that the sculptor\u2019s basic concern is making sure \u201cit holds up\u201d\u2014structurally, of course, but also visually? To do this, one needs to get around gravity, in both senses of the word.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Le bouton<\/em> is literally<\/em> held up by a thread winding its way from the hole in the button, which serves as a base, to the hole, which is not at all occipital, bored into the back of a recumbent head. The sculpture gives the impression of levitating, standing as if by magic.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Drapeau adds that bipedalism, by freeing up the hands, allowed humans to use tools effectively and invent all kinds of things … like the four-hole button! When I go to your studio, I\u2019m impressed by the gleaming equipment occupying the space. During my last visit, you showed me the new acquisition: a highly sophisticated wood lathe that can make up to five thousand revolutions per minute. You started it up, then looked at me with a boyish grin: \u201cIt\u2019s amazing, isn\u2019t it? It makes almost no noise.\u201d Cutting, turning, planing, sanding, being able to do all this without abusing silence: isn\u2019t this the absolute dream of the solitary artist racking his brains in the studio, watching the dust dance in the light?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Gilles$
Gilles Mihalcean<\/strong>
Le bouton<\/em>, 2024.
Photo: Suzelle Levasseur, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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GM:<\/strong> My sculptures are made by assemblage and take shape according to an ongoing process of expansion and general dissatisfaction, maintained until they show signs of a failed object. I would say that aimlessness is the basis of an assemblage\u2019s existence, because it\u2019s a technique that lends itself to any kind of construction and deconstruction. Without intention, based solely on its own necessity as object, the sculpture is not at ease in the world of artefacts: it is neither knife, nor tissue, nor watering can. The sculpture doesn\u2019t want or seek anything: this brings it closer to a living organism and, consequently, to the concept of teleonomy developed by the biologist Jacques Monod. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
All this to say, Charles, that I am not the inventor of my sculptures. For Le bouton<\/em>, I remember drilling all the holes and recycling, cutting, and gluing pieces of wood, but I didn\u2019t imagine it, and I never knew why it appeared to me in this terrible \u201cfinished\u201d state. I am first and foremost a worker. You can speak to it better than me. Plato said that in terms of skill the user is more important than the maker.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CG:<\/strong> Again at La Place Commune, Bruno Dubuc, a science popularizer trained in neuroscience and the author of a hefty tome about the brain, quickly summarizes its second chapter, titled nothing less than \u201cDe la \u2018poussi\u00e8re d\u2019\u00e9toile\u2019 \u00e0 la vie\u201d [From \u201cStardust\u201d to Life]!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Listening to him talk about the living, I can\u2019t help but think about the ways that artists speak about their creative practices, especially authors who say that their characters tell them how the story must evolve. I am fascinated by notions of self-organization and autopoiesis, which Dubuc sums up as \u201cthe notion of self-organization [that] allows us to understand how order can spontaneously appear in disorder and lead to the spontaneous emergence of a form, a structure that is distinct from the environment around it.\u201d^{2<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 2 <\/a> - Bruno Dubuc, Notre cerveau \u00e0 tous les niveaux<\/em> (Montr\u00e9al: \u00c9cosoci\u00e9t\u00e9, 2024), 63 (our translation).<\/span> He draws our attention to the work of the biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, who see autopoiesis\u2014a system\u2019s ability to produce itself\u2014as a fundamental characteristic of life. It\u2019s a creative power that artists dream of.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Gilles$
Gilles Mihalcean<\/strong>
Corps c\u00e9leste<\/em>, 2021.
Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay, Collection of Ville de Laval, courtesy of the artist
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When you say that you make the sculpture without intention, I have the impression that this is what you would like: the sculpture making itself and setting in motion its own network of meaning. It\u2019s surprising, in fact, that we often use the metaphor of tinkering to talk about evolution, as the microbiologist Fran\u00e7ois Jacob does: \u201c[Evolution] works on what already exists … [Natural selection] resembles not engineering but tinkering … [The] tinkerer manages with odds and ends. Often without even knowing what he is going to produce, he uses whatever he finds around him, old cardboards, pieces of string, fragments of wood or metal, to make some kind of workable object.\u201d ^{3<\/sup><\/a><\/span>} 3 <\/a> - Fran\u00e7ois Jacob, The Possible and the Actual<\/em>, trans. Franklin Philip (New York: Pantheon Books, 1982), 34.<\/span> I know you\u2019re interested in science, particularly astrophysics. As a result, how can I not see, in the thick black thread and its whimsical course, a living artery irrigating the forms and, in the aggregate floating above the button, a complex molecule, a bizarre celestial body, or a spaceship? Through the metaphor of sewing, you stage the fundamental work of connection<\/em> and ask me to do the same in my neural pathways. I sense your mischievous pleasure in testing my abilities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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GM:<\/strong> Jacob\u2019s remarks bring us closer to the avenue of sculpture\u2019s creative capacity, which, as I\u2019ve been trying to say, produces itself, takes shape independently of the artist who nevertheless makes it. Although the artist may make it for identity-based, experiential, or emotional reasons, we must recognize that the sculpture developing on their workbench comes from somewhere beyond their knowledge, straight from what I call \u201cthe actions of materials and forms,\u201d whose hidden and mysterious behaviours are based on the unexpected and on impromptu apparitions due to the shifting disorder of the cluttered studio. How many times have I lost the common thread I was following because I turned my head and spotted some wood or serrated joints or split pieces, which then suddenly found themselves in my sculpture simply because one of their sides encouraged collage? The captivating effect created by this small comfort transformed my sculpture and changed my expectations. Before becoming the base for other objects with holes, the button had been the forgotten seat of a piano stool.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
CG:<\/strong> I have no doubt that random forms and a certain mystery play a part in the making of your sculptures. But when I look at them, I have a strong feeling that they also radiate lived experiences, whether everyday gestures, memories, worries, or desires. I\u2019m skeptical of the (almost religious) idea of a transcendence of identity. Instead, I feel a mixture, an identity colliding with the world and leaving only shards behind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The density and heterogeneity of the white agglutination towering over the blue button challenge viewers, however \u201cskilled\u201d they may be, because they can\u2019t delve into interpreting it without \u201cbacktracking and deflecting.\u201d They persevere all the same, not because they think they can explain the enigma by establishing a comprehensive reading but because it\u2019s human nature to assign meaning to everything. They seek to penetrate the work, just like you did, in a tangible way. Because in addition to cutting, you also did a lot of piercing. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The woman\u2019s head, with eyes that appear closed, is surrounded by objects that\u2014with the exception of a small house\u2014have holes: gun barrel, hair curlers (or toilet paper rolls), tube, binoculars, and phallus (or dildo). To test one of my piercing realizations, I resort to the concept of \u201cscopophilia,\u201d which, according to Freud, is sexual in nature and fundamental to a child\u2019s development in discovering the world. The combination of binoculars and penis\u2014and not that of a sewing machine and umbrella\u2014leads me to the pleasure we experience in possessing or being possessed by the gaze. But I don\u2019t feel the need to go deeper down this road … Retracing my steps, I think that, at the very least, this sculpture is about the gaze. It puts us, for that matter, in a strange vacillating state: we alternate between looking at it and looking through it to discover the portion of the world that it carves out.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Gilles$
Gilles Mihalcean<\/strong>
Humano\u00efde<\/em>, 2024.
Photo: Suzelle Levasseur, courtesy of the artist & Chiguer art contemporain, Qu\u00e9bec & Montr\u00e9al<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
One of the objects into which we look seems connected to one of your memories: that of the curlers around which your hairdresser mother rolled hair almost all her life. Do you remember that I wanted to make a film about her, a woman who, at the age of ninety-five, still worked in her salon in L\u2019Abord-\u00e0-Plouffe, Laval, which seemed frozen in the 1960s? Perhaps your mother, whom you saw making her own hair dyes and \u201csculpting heads\u201d all day long in your childhood, left a greater mark on you than you think. You have spoken sometimes about the lineage of your Romanian grandfather, who was also a sculptor. Does your mother also have an important place in your inner country?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
GM:<\/strong> Lucille cut hair; I cut heads. I know that I carry the weight of a vernacular identity whose strengths and weaknesses are the source of my imaginative activities. Yet sculpture has a consistency that makes meaning suffer and, despite all my efforts to bring it to life, it\u2019s no use: it renders only its factuality, the extremely factuality. It\u2019s important to understand that all ideas die in sculpture, which is an object without will. Sculpture forces artists to always sacrifice their inspirations, no matter how compelling they may be, for the sake of a bulge, a seam, or some other meagre thing\u2014snitches that give away all the secrets.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Like you, my inevitable need for meaning leads me to many interpretations that I sometimes try to support, for example, by adding a burst of colour or by inserting a new piece, but every time I try to restrict the meaning, I realize that there is no more sculpture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
By making clusters\u2014agglutinations, as you call them\u2014I manage to experience the duality between doing and meaning, precisely because these masses have the ability to both attract and numb the gaze. In 1995, I argued that we shouldn\u2019t look at a sculpture for too long. It was a floating idea but I was convinced. This intuitive conviction continues to haunt me, and I still think that by looking at it for too long, we will lose sight of its true richness, which we can find only if we\u2019re not looking for it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
One day, Guido Molinari told me, \u201cYou only make metaphors.\u201d I received this somewhat disdainful remark like a breeze of fresh air. I was already convinced that using the model of analogical substitutions of the metaphor for my constructions helped me to express the truth about my culture. Metaphor forgoes describing an object even as it retains the underlying and unattainable desire of doing so. It is a weak thought that seeks no foundation; it is polysemic and serves as a weakening technique. Metaphor has allowed me to work joyously all these years under the cover of shame, the ink of my country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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