Solitudes is a project that brings together hundreds of books that have been transformed and reassembled into tableaux. By repeatedly folding each page of paper, Jérôme Fortin achieves stunning effects of texture, form, line, groove and colour that delineate the exhibition space. Novels, colouring books, telephone books, comic strips and crosswords provide source material for works that are repeatedly manipulated in ways that require regularity and patience. The methodological approach taken by the artist is almost meditative; Fortin lends himself to the spirit of solitude and isolation characteristic of reading, and then shares with his audience these transformations of common objects into original and varied large-format compositions.
Produced from everyday objects, and based on the concept of sixteenth century cabinets of curiosity (in which collectors and the curious marvelled at the exotic findings displayed therein), Fortin’s work dates back to 1996, when he created genuine curios from matchsticks, cork stoppers, tin cans, and other odds and ends. In 2000, the object – neither wholly jewel-like nor amulet-like, but always visually unique, gave way to work developed in series, where forms are repeated and variations are essentially based on colour – telephone cords, books, plastic bottles – returning the transformed and variegated object back into its original industrial nature.
Fortin’s work has been shown in several group exhibitions in Quebec and abroad, such as the Biennale de Montréal in 1998, Galerie UQAM in 2000, and the Officina America in Bologna in 2002. For a residency in New York, he produced work that was to be presented as part of the exhibition Growth and Risk – Québec New York 2001, but that was tragically interrupted by the events of September 11. His first solo show within the institutional framework of a museum, is currently being held at the Musée d’art de Joliette.
The artist would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, and the art magazine Parachute for their contributions towards this project.
