Raymond Gervais

Raymond Gervais, avant-garde conceptual artist (born in 1946 in Montréal, Québec) creates multidisciplinary and multimedia performances and installations. Art history — particularly the history of avant-garde music — has greatly influenced this learned artist, who explores the listening process and the tension between sound and silence, as well as the relationship between sound, text and image. His works have been displayed at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the National Gallery of Canada. In 2014, he won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.

Youth, Education and Influences

As a child, Raymond Gervais was constantly exposed to a variety of sounds from the repair work his father did on televisions and radios. These sounds — white noise, static, skipping records and, of course, music — would later feature in his work. An uncle who collected jazz records lived with his family for a time in the early sixties and introduced Gervais to a number of jazz musicians and composers (Edgar Varèse, Albert Ayler, Thelonious Monk, Brian Barley, etc.) who would directly or indirectly inspire a number of his creations.

From 1969 to 1971, he worked as an assistant at The Warehouse, a record store specializing in jazz and world music. In 1973, Gervais and some musician friends (Vincent Dionne, Michel Di Torre, Yves Bouliane and Robert Marcel Lepage) founded the Atelier de musique expérimentale (AME), a non-profit organization whose members organized small concerts, published a manifesto in the magazine Médiart and put on exhibitions about avant-garde music at Montréal galleries such as the Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal. During this period, Gervais also worked as a host and researcher at Radio-Canada. In 1976, he began publishing articles about avant-garde music in Parachute, a magazine founded the previous year.

Early Career

When Raymond Gervais entered the arts scene in 1973, his primary interest was music, but in 1975 he produced Commencer par / puisqu’à toute fin, a video in which he explored the visual, aural and textual aspects of a musical performance. He deconstructed and analyzed the physics of performance and listening, all the while creating visual representations of silence, voices, breathing and the sounds of each instrument played. This work was an ideological agenda of sorts, outlining the thought process that would become the common thread of his work as a whole.

In 1976, at the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal, Gervais put on his first performance, Roche, in which he used a rock to play the wires of an open piano. The same year, he created his first installation, 12+1=, which was displayed at the Galerie Média. In the installation, 13 record players, placed side by side on a raised structure, simultaneously played 13 different pieces of music of varying lengths. Through the physical arrangement of records, sleeves, record players, and musical instruments, all of which would become pervasive elements in his work, Gervais examined the tension between the images and sounds created and between the creation and the dissemination of these multidimensional expressions. Sounds evoked images; images evoked sounds.

Mid-Career

In the 1980s, Gervais explored the concept of aural imagination and created three installations inspired by the life and work of Claude Debussy. In the installation Claude Debussy regarde l’Amérique (1989–90), the artist reunited the French composer with his interest in American culture. In the early 1990s, Gervais gradually replaced the use of music and sound in his installations with the study and experience of silence, suggesting sound visually through photographs, musical objects and text.

In 1997, his installation Le théâtre du son, which was at once minimalist and large-scale, was displayed at the Chapelle historique du Bon-Pasteur in Montréal. The installation evoked a variety of sounds and music through the use of short phrases or word associations written in black on dozens of white CD covers, which were arranged on thin shelves running the length of the chapel walls. In this contemplative setting, visitors were immersed in an atmosphere of silence and concentration. The text, in connection with the symbolism of the CDs, prompted visitors to imagine a multitude of disparate sounds.

Recent Projects

In 2001, the installation Les couleurs de la musique, composed of album covers and records, was exhibited at the Galerie René Blouin before being acquired by the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec. The same year, Gervais curated the exhibition Phono Photo at the Dazaibo centre in Montréal as part of a project that explored the relationships between records and photography as multiple objects of dissemination.

In 2011, curator Nicole Gingras organized a two-part retrospective exhibition of Gervais’ work. Held first at the Leonard & Bina Ellen Art Gallery at Concordia University (fall 2011) and then at the VOX Contemporary Image Centre (fall 2012) under the title Raymond Gervais 3x1, the exhibition showcased dozens of Gervais’ multidimensional works. These ranged from a video of a musical performance in 1975 to installations from the early 2000s that used words to evoke sounds and images. The exhibition also highlighted the continuity present in his work. A notable feature of this retrospective was a long statement from the artist in which he describes his early career and details his musical and aural influences.

Honours and Awards

In 2010, Gervais received the Ozias-Leduc award from the Fondation Émile-Nelligan for his body of work. In 2014, he won the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.