>> Montreal artists Sylvain Bouthillette
and David Elliott, yin to each other’s yang

by RUPERT BOTTENBERG

Give a thousand monkeys the same tool, a typewriter, and one of them’s bound to stumble on something publishable, at least by Mirror standards. Now give Montreal visual artists Sylvain Bouthillette and David Elliott the same tools—canvas, colour, a shared studio and a grab-bag of common “trigger” elements such as birds and stars—and they will come to very different, yet equally effective, conclusions.

Elliott’s works are based in the pop art aesthetic of the ’60s, initially charming the viewer with innocent ephemera that, considered more deeply, spell out a story as sweet or sour as the viewer’s own reading allows. Bouthillette, the one-time bass player of Montreal’s prog-punk figureheads Bliss, presents a more surly, chaotic vision, under which lies a very positive message of hope, faith and self-awareness.

As the beer was chilling for the vernissage of the dual exhibition Fra Delinquenti, the Mirror sat the duo down for a compare-as-you-dare chat.

Mirror: The two of you aren’t just sharing wall space at the Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges. You share a studio as well.
Sylvain Bouthillette: We’ve shared this studio for four years, but before that, he had his studio across the corridor from me, so we were always really close. I tend to spread right up to his side anyway.
David Elliott: We first met at a schoolhouse space in Little Burgundy. You know, the regular exchanges, back and forth across the hall, looking for screwdrivers and tubes of paint.

M: Now you’re sharing more than just tools. It strikes me that your paintings are two sides of the same coin.
DE: This show suggests that there are common things between us, and there are, like the birds and the stars. But we’re also very different in terms of approach. Sylvain’s imagery comes out of hardcore and skateboard culture. I’m 10 years older than he is, so I have a connection to pop from the ’60s that is still, I think, there in the work. His connections are more to the vocabulary of the early ’80s. We do share some things—we laugh at each other when we say, is that my star or yours? Stop stealing my birds!

Pop charm, punk bite
M: David, your work owes a great deal to the pop-art sensibility of the ’60s. The use of the primary-colour dots, the blown-up printing pattern, screams “pop” to me in how it suggests mass media. When did you settle on this approach?
DE: It’s recent, actually. I always put a sort of psychedelic ground there, but in this new stuff, I’m quoting more obviously the language of pop, of comic strips and mass publishing. I like to mix languages—some things are really refined and others aren’t, some that seem to come from the ’50s and others that were generated on the computer yesterday. It strikes me that that’s how things are now. Our whole culture is a mongrel. It’s natural that artists and musicians operating in our culture will do a lot of picking over styles, looks, approaches and effects, to see what one can make out of it.

M: I wouldn’t classify your work as retro, per se.
DE: You listen to Wilco and you think of Gram Parsons or Big Star. I confess to loving the whole lineage of that stuff—you can take it back to the Flying Burrito Brothers, or right up to Bryan Adams. He’s current, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t sound a bit like Parsons. Likewise, I’m aware that my stuff has one foot in history, and hopefully, the other foot in the present.

M: Sylvain, your images, on the other hand, clearly have that ragged, abrasive punk edge.
SB: One of my big influences is John Coltrane, as far as attitude goes. You can hear his saxophone playing as a form of aggression, but for him, it was a message of love and spiritual height, the search for God. What you’ll find in a lot of, say, grindcore is that the aggression is there to alienate, but with Coltrane and other artists like him, the aggression was there to include, to create a spiritual tension that keeps you up there and really focused. There’s a quality of presence that you can’t ignore, and I want my work to have that quality. Not to blast you in the head, but to tell you, hey, look at me and let’s see what can happen. A lot of my work is intended to be explosive, to force its presence on you.

Restart the heart
M: Do you find yourselves checking each other, each making sure the other doesn’t get too syrupy or, conversely, caustic?
DE: It’s always done in a humorous way. Not only Sylvain but all my friends tease me about the sentimentality in my work, the hearts and the roses. What I like to do with those clichéd things is pump them up—the heart’s a good example. I pumped it up so it’s so big you can hug it, this 500-pound heart that you can put your arms around. One of the factors in the development of what I do is my kids. They’re between 16 and 21. As they were growing up and I was developing as a painter, they encouraged me to work in a way that they could recognize. Why would I do paintings that my kids and their friends would be confused by? I wanted them to like my work—I didn’t want this split between what’s happening on the two sides of my world, home and studio. So I started with a vocabulary taken from Disney and sentimentality, the birds and stars and all that magic whimsy, verging on a kind of nursery rhyme vocabulary. I’m also attracted to clichéd sentimentality in the sense of wondering how many more love songs can anyone write? The love song should be finished by now. After Al Green and Teddy Pendergrass, what can you do with that language? Then someone comes around and writes a new love song that breaks your heart. So there’s nothing wrong with using clichés, just find a way to make them fresh and alive.
SB: I think David and I agree that cynicism and irony create a distance that is too much of a safe place. It’s not very interesting anymore. It’s good to do things as honestly as you can. Of course, it’s hard to be completely honest, we’re not very naïve, unfortunately, but we try to be a bit naïve, implicated in our work without the cynicism to protect ourselves. When I look at David’s paintings, I see how vulnerable he is. I can’t really laugh at him for putting rainbows, hearts, stars and birds in his paintings. It’s quite interesting to put yourself in an edgy place where you can’t use the work to make your ego feel stronger. Look at my crows—they’re blasting you, but at the same time they’re a bit ridiculous. I like the idea that my work makes me vulnerable and stronger at the same time. :

Fra Delinquenti runs until Oct. 6 at Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges (5290 Côte-des-Neiges) 872-6889