Mitchell Charbonneau

I do not usually walk through an exhibition with the artist. When asked, I generally decline. I tell the artist or gallerist that I do not need a guide. On those occasions when I do agree, it is usually because I already know the artist and their work, and such a walk-through becomes something closer to a studio visit. In the case of Mitchell Charbonneau, I knew the work and had only briefly met him once before. Knowing the work led to an invitation to continue our earlier conversation. An hour spent talking in the gallery largely confirmed my initial reading. Yet it is precisely the points of divergence that matter. The ability to disagree with the artist is what distinguishes criticism from art writing.

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My task as a critic is to substantiate my interpretation. The artist’s task is to manifest  their intentions both conceptual and subjective as fully as possible by whatever means available to them. My job is not to divine those intentions but to interpret what has become of them. These are distinct, though overlapping, forms of knowledge. The distance between them is productive. Neither the artist nor the work can opt out of the viewer’s comprehension. The exhibition’s title, Remain, signals this condition: remain as a verb indicates persistence; as a noun, what is left over. The title signals a refusal to choose between action and remnant. In Charbonneau’s case, that distance is marked by a recurring return to the relation between object, image, and re-presentation.

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Organized around the reproduction of everyday objects through casting, carving, and surface intervention, Charbonneau’s earlier work operated through a procedural logic in which familiar forms were repeatedly reconstructed, indexed, and refigured. What persists is not iconic continuity but the persistence of a problem: negotiating the object’s status as replica, original, and re-presentation. In Remain, Charbonneau presents meticulously fabricated trompe l’oeil polychromed works that appear as burnt-out fluorescent tubes (Figure Study) implying it is the subject of observation and monochrome  wall works that appear to be reliefs taken from sections of foundation wall (Foundations), which is an ambiguous reference to  structural support, and historical grounding. With these works he eschews the logic of the found object and the Readymade, replacing them with their representation. In this respect the work operates closer to Jasper Johns than Marcel Duchamp. Like Johns’s painted bronze beer cans, Savarin with its paintbrushes, and sculpted metal flashlight, Charbonneau’s objects are not appropriations, but replicas: constructions made for display. 

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What emerges is more complex. These works move from concept to fabrication, but what emerges is neither simply object nor image. The clouded tubes are representations of burnt-out fluorescent bulbs. As fabrications, the bulbs never possessed the function they are depicted as having lost. There is a deadpan absurdity to this: a perfect replica of a burnt-out bulb that could never burn. With the bulbs the question of function is recalled. These works depict a failure that never occurred. At the level of image, the tubes mimic standardized industrial technology; at the level of object, they present themselves as modular structural units. The bulbs are life-size and appear to lean precariously against the gallery walls in differing arrangements and numbers; the wall fragments appear sectioned from standard foundations of stone or cast concrete. This scale ties each object to the viewer’s body and to the dimensions of actual fluorescent tubes and building walls. Any departure from that scale would alter the terms through which the object is recognized.