| Lancette Arts Journal Founded in 2000 |
DVD & Film Reviews From our Archives |
July 2006 |
By Alidė Kohlhaas
In some form or other, we all want to chase shadows and turn them into solid forms. Artist Jean-Pierre Larocque doesn't so much chase shadows, he traps them in clay and on paper.
Jean-Pierre Larocque: Trapping Shadows is only a brief film, captured on DVD. Its duration is not even eight minutes long, but in that time the camera has caught the creative process and made us witness its power.
Larocque, as he kneads, cuts, folds, rolls and scores clay, transmits to the viewer the sensual pleasure that can be derived from working with his pliable material. He sometimes carefully drapes the clay over an armature, other times he seems to playfully throws it at the object he is creating. One can see that both intuition and carefully thought out reasoning are at work here.
When he turns to charcoal and paper, we are a witness to yet another form of energy he puts into his art. He does not just draw. He grinds the charcoal into the paper, into the shapes he has drawn. Then, with a knife or eraser, he scrapes some of the charcoal off again, leaving 'wounds' that give depth to his images, yet also blurs their edges. In a way he releases some of the trapped shadows, only to capture them again as he begins to draw again over the just removed blackness of the charcoal.
The strange thing is that while we may not necessarily like the shapes he has created — there is something alien and even threatening about them — as we watch the artist at work, we have been offered a rare glimpse at one of nature's most unusual, and least understood processes, the human creative process. In just a few minutes this film reveals to us what it has always been difficult to describe with words. In this case, a picture is definitely worth a thousand words, as little as I, the writer, like to admit it.
The film was directed by Carolane Saint-Pierre and produced in conjunction with the exhibition, Jean Pierre Larocque: Clay Sculpture and Drawings now on display at the newly renovated Gardiner Museum of Ceramic Arts. It can be purchased at the Gardiner.
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