Jérôme Bouchard
Born in 1977 in Quebec (CA), works and lives in Brussels (B)
About the Artist
Having completed his education at the School of Visual and Media Arts at UQAM in Montreal, Jerome Bouchard’s work is featured in numerous collections, including the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, the Montreal Museum of Contemporary Art, the Joliette Museum of Contemporary Art, the collection of the Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec, and the HBC New York collection. In 2021, following several residencies at TOKAS (Tokyo) and the Cité internationale des Arts (Paris), he established himself in Belgium.
In his artistic practice, Bouchard employs various techniques that blend painting and digital cutting-edge technology to interpret scientific data. Recently, these data originate from LiDAR (1) surveys, focusing on terrains on the fringes or in adjacent areas of interest to scientists. These landscapes grapple with invisible and unpredictable phenomena tied to their degradation. Each project begins with a foundation in scientific documentation, such as satellite images obscured by clouds, errors in geographical surveys, or abstract images derived from geo-data. The obscuring or absence of information stimulates a return to materiality. Bouchard employs a range of processes, combining manual and machine work (what he considers as painting), to offer translations. However, far from merely illustrating a point, his processes themselves give room for unforeseen elements, diverting his original intentions. Within the material, this manifests as smoke deposits, scratching traces, clusters of perforations, or traces of mud or burns. These elements, emerging in the blind spots of creation, redraw new trajectories of interpretations.
(1) Light Detection & Ranging. A modern mapping instrument that uses laser remote sensing to translate the environment into a point cloud.
