Projects Foundation

Since 2008, Simon Bertrand has been copying, by hand, some of our great founding narratives, including The Epic of Gilgamesh, Odyssey and The Bible. His process enables the viewer to grasp the whole of each book in a single glance, rendering the narrative’s complete arc immediately visible. The words compressed onto the paper represent the itinerary borrowed by the artist’s hand during the transcription process; each chapter then becomes a locality, like a location on a map. The writing and the reading thus become understood in a rapport completely unrelated to duration, within a temporality and spatiality founded in the movement of the body, both the artist’s and the viewer’s, from one end of the surface to the other. Through his activities, the artist seeks to measure himself to the texts, first in rereading them and then in rewriting them integrally. The new layouts of the texts, the deletions, the shapes and voids refer to various aspects of the story he wishes to highlight. This body of works arises from a need to open a new dialogue about each of the stories selected by the artist; to transform them, but also from a need to physically traverse those stories and be traversed by them.

Just as light from distant galaxies takes millions of years to reach us, the poetry of certain authors seems to hail from a distant time. Shining forth from a remote past, from a world scarcely imagined. For poetry predates language and the written word, it is scrawled even unto stardust.

Atlas is born of the troubled eyesight which developed during the re-transcription of the founding texts (2007-2015). Bertrand came to work blindly by relying on memorization, a physical constraint which provided inspiration and gave form to Atlas.

The project consists of a reinvention of myths and constellations upon a newly drawn map of the stars, based on poems blindly re-transcribed. It is a fictional cartography of a universe where the constellations of galaxies are associated with the poetry of varying epochs. On the circular surface, each point represents a galaxy visible today^[1]. One million points have been carefully counted and drawn. An initial constellation connects certain galaxies like a subtle dialogue between authors. Impossible encounters across time and space.

The Celestial Map

The immeasurable task of circumscribing the visible universe in its entirety on a single paper surface alludes to the figure Atlas from Greek mythology, supporting the cosmos on his shoulders.

This map is a manifestation of the artist’s fascination with astronomical numerics. It is rather difficult to wrap one’s mind around the concept of one million entities, it is a purely abstract notion. There does not exist a digestible reference to such a great number that we can grasp, not even in the nocturnal sky^[2].

Using a tally counter, Bertrand counted to one hundred, ten thousand times, in order to reach one million. His intention was to live the experience of what this number represents. That each point was drawn by hand by the artist is what makes this experience tangible. It is thus possible for the observer to grasp the immensity at hand, having been wielded by a single entity, endured by a mortal. Distance becomes felt once it has been tread.

Constellations

On the map, the initial constellation is formed by eight points each representing a poem. Together, they are as the words of a single phrase. With such free association comes new correspondence and the echoes reverberating between each poem give rise to new meanings. The order in which they were re-transcribed is essential to the understanding of what the phrase imparts. For the artist, this series of poems harkens to a nostalgic memory of a meeting which never took place, in a place that never existed. A memory which inhabits the mind despite its unknowability.

As for the re-transcription of the poems, the number of readings that it took to memorize each one determines the number of times it is to be re-transcribed. The condensed text thus represents a manifestation of the task of memorization. Without any use of speech during the process, the artist memorizes by writing in a notebook, relying solely on the handwritten word. Once the piece is memorized, Bertrand decides upon the size and format of the paper required based on the number of readings it took to learn that particular piece.

The artist has chosen La courbe de tes yeux by Paul Éluard as the first poem. It is the first poem Bertrand read in his youth, deeply moved by the image of the contour of one’s eye tracing the lines of another’s heart. The re-transcription of this poem incorporates a visible, white circle which alludes to the image of the eye and the aureole of time invoked by Éluard, but also the circular structure of the poem itself. As is the case with the celestial map, the circle became the form with which Bertrand decided to work with for this constellation.

Thus Atlas is a new celestial map with an initial, pioneering constellation. There still remain many more poems to memorize and relate together, and therefore an infinite possibility of worlds and constellations further to draw.

^[1] Galaxies which have been observed by telescope – approximately one million. In reality, there are far more.

^[2] Each hemisphere contains approximately 4500 stars visible to the naked eye.

 

Projects The Beginnings

The Beginnings is a culmination of two projects spanning more than two years work (2014-2016). The Prophet and John are the result of a collaboration with my friend John whom I met in September 2014. In the two years following our initial meet, I was greatly preoccupied by the challenges he faced. I was ready to do anything in order to support him during his difficult time. I felt restless and wondered ceaselessly what we could we be doing more. Each confronted by feelings of powerlessness, we felt the urge to work together. Our friendship transformed what were once initially independent projects into an indissociable entity.

The Prophet 

This first project is born of our shared interest in Kahlil Gibran and his life story. With The Prophet, we sought most of all to echo the translation of language. To create a meeting of Orient and Occident, which is of direct reference to the author’s life and work^[1]. The idea came that I should transcribe his book The Prophet in its entirety. I would rewrite, by hand, the original English version but also produce an Arab translation, displaying them side by side on the same sheet of paper. By including a translation of the work in the author’s native tongue, we sought to invite a return to the culture of Islam which lies at the heart of this book.

Learning to write in Arabic was an immense challenge. I had no experience with the language’s calligraphy, having to teach myself to write as if for the first time. I had to learn to control each movement of my hand in order to reconcile the beauty of the written word with the rules of an established, albeit unknown to me, form of communication. Such labour provided an escape from the feeling of being powerless by way of engaging physically with the work. Meanwhile on the opposite side of the world, John embarked upon an expedition along the Kokoda Trail and was engaged in a different kind of battle, while I desperately continued to transcribe. Just as the main character of the book must leave his village for a long voyage, John had embarked upon his own.

It took more than twelve months of work to createThe Prophet. In this project, the twenty-six faces of the rhombicuboctahedron^[2] at the centre of the composition represent the twenty-six chapters of the book. Gibran was inspired by Sufism, which is defined as the inner mystical dimension of Islam. The word is derived from the Arabic “safa” or “safw” which translates roughly to “crystalline purity”. I therefore integrated this complex form, similar to that of a diamond, into the centre of the exhibit as an expression of the author’s inspirations. 

John

John was elaborated in three stages: erasure, retranscription, and interment. The first element is a sheet of flax paper on which I wrote with graphite pencil and then erased, repeatedly, over the course of six months. This led to me wearing down each and every eraser I had, which I have kept preciously in my possession. These two acts were executed throughout John’s medical treatment[3]. The remains of my erasers will be displayed in a pile on the ground in the gallery space. They are a physical manifestation of the duration of John’s treatments and a testament to my work. Erasing, rubbing, striving to make disappear. I then made a large incision on the sheet of paper which was thereafter repaired by a technician specializing in art restoration. I did this to mark the important operation John underwent in February 2016. What John’s body was being put through, so would it be for the sheet of paper.

The second element of this project was to re-transcribe with ink pen a quantum physics conference John sent me upon returning from his expedition. The conference discusses the notion of consciousness as viewed and understood by the discipline of quantum physics[4], which strongly relates to Gibran’s book. It was obvious that it should be included, positioning John as an echo to The Prophet. The way which Gibran discusses “Life” in his work embraces the notion of fundamental consciousness as an intrinsic quality of all physical elements, just as scientist Chris Field elaborates during the conference.

The final piece of the exhibit is a message I wrote to John a few days after he passed away, which I covered with twenty-four layers of graphite. I also drew two figures above the message, a tetrahedron and an icosahedron[5], which allude back to the stage or erasure; recalling the heat generated by friction, as well as the beads of sweat which fell upon the paper by my efforts. After having covered over everything, I punctured several small holes in the blackened paper with a needle over the course of six months, yielding unsuspected radiance: to cover without ever more erasing, to accept the dark surface and to puncture it so that light may pass.

The Les Débuts / The Beginnings exhibit therefore revisits John and The Prophet, exploring the various undertakings that have taken place during my past three years with John.

 

 

^[1] Born in Lebanon, Gibran’s most well-known work was written in English, although his first texts were written in Arabic. The Prophet, which took him ten years to write, is the second most read book in the world, surpassed only by the Bible. He immigrated to the United States at a very young age, later returning to Lebanon in order to study Arabic culture.

^[2] Archimedean Solid

[3] During each of his treatments, I did blackened and erased three times as related to the three medications he was being treated with. It took over four hours to complete each time. John was 36 years old at the time, one year older than me. He had peritoneal cancer.

[4] The five Platonic solids represent the five natural elements: Earth, air, water, fire and the aether.

[5] What can physics tell us about consciousness, Chris Fields. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Apds8KbtMr8