Nevertheless, Thibault’s work, even if recognisably rooted in established practices, has not been received without controversies, mainly in the cases of his temporary installations. As stated, Thibault’s listing of favorite artists and architects should not surprise even the most superficial observer of his work: all of them display precisely the same keen awareness of the fluctuating, unstable borders regulating the relations between built and un-built, land and art, landscape and architecture. As for the arts, he lists Walter de Maria, James Turrell, Richard Serra, Richard Long, Donald Judd, Carl André, Joseph Beuys, and the abstract paintings of Richard Mill, a Québécois artist overtly influenced by the minimalism and the land art of the 1970s. In architecture, among the masters, Thibault cites Mies van der Rohe, Louis Kahn, Luis Barragan, Alvar Aalto, Gunnar Asplund, and Frank Lloyd Wright, while in the contemporary scene he points to Peter Zumthor, Sou Fujimoto, Saana, and Atelier Bow Wow together with Go Hasegawa. He quietly names architects and artists who, unsurprisingly, have inspired and influenced his work. Thibault is clearly not just testing the borders between those disciplines and arts but also freely and creatively borrowing from each field. The tireless questioning and exploring of the relations linking landscape and architecture in Pierre Thibault’s work consistently challenges the limits between the domains of architecture, landscape architecture, land art, performance art, and installation art. In turn, architecture can subtly mark or lightly set down on the landscape, making it inhabitable for a fleeting moment. A fragile mosquito screen assures the comfort of a lazy, contemplative afternoon in a veranda-like space. Transformed into seating places or coffee tables, they punctuate interior and exterior spaces. The same trunks, sawed in smaller sections, are readable as sculptures. Coarse tree trunks become rustic columns or pilasters. Stones, belonging to the site, step up to the house in an uneven path and merge with the wooden deck at the entrance. A treetop pierces the cantilevered prolongation of a roof. The waters of a stream come lapping at the foundations of a villa set in a wooded area surrounded by paths covered with mosses. Landscape, besides, may surreptitiously enter or literally overrun architecture. Most often, however, in the work of Pierre Thibault architecture and landscape provide a setting for each other in a synchronic conceptual and actual movement. A high promontory offers a perching place for a nest-like shelter. Austere volumes, intensely white or stark black, are strikingly posed against glaring winter landscapes, or set amidst the exquisite greens of pastoral summer sceneries. The timber walls of a house in a forest are glimpsed among the branches of deciduous trees and conifers. Now and again, landscape is used to frame architecture. Immense glass walls act as almost invisible thresholds between interior and exterior landscapes. Windows strategically narrowed to the size of vertical or horizontal splits restrict the view to ribbons of landscape adroitly carved out of the surrounding scenery. The volumes of a country house, in the act of bridging an uneven topography, design a telescope that suggests the zooming of the gaze on far horizons. A house turns its back to the road and extends its arms to embrace and focus the view on an intimate bay on the shore of a lake. A villa on a plateau acts as a belvedere over the expanse of one of Quebec’s immense rivers. Sometimes architecture is there to frame the landscape. Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, “A conversation: What is it? What is it for?,” 1977 2Īrchitect Pierre Thibault’s oeuvre interrogates the interactions, boundaries and interfaces linking architecture and landscape. What defines it is the AND, as something which has its place between the elements or between the sets. It is not the elements or the sets which define the multiplicity. Jack Burnham, The Structure of Art, 1973 1 We might call this the matrix of logic modes controlling the making of art. So far it has been hypothesized that all art is based on a quaternary structure where two terms are analogously equal to two other terms there are a number of variations within this four-part structure.
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