Through a poignant visual narrative, Eveline Boulva immortalizes the northern landscapes of the St. Lawrence River and the North Atlantic, offering a unique perspective, at the confluence of art, geography and ecology, on these ever changing majestic coastal panoramas. In an era where the rapid transformation of landscapes is more than ever at the heart of our preoccupations, La turbulence des écueils calls us to reflect on the fragile beauty of our natural environments and the pressing measures needed to ensure their preservation.
“La turbulence des écueils” is a visual testament of two journeys during which Eveline Boulva made stopovers in Rimouski, Gaspé and St. John’s Newfoundland. Based on carefully collected photographic and videographic archives gathered throughout these peregrinations, the paintings presented attest to the artist’s long-term commitment to raising awareness of pressing ecological issues, exacerbated by human action, that lie behind the spectacular beauty of natural landscapes.
Conceptually, aesthetically and philosophically, this body of work delves into the notion of “fragmentation”, inspired by the scattered ice of the St. Lawrence and the impetuous waves breaking on the coast of Newfoundland. Ice, embodying both the symptom and the emblem of the climate crisis, emerges here as a potent symbol of the impact of human action on natural landscapes. Through her works, Boulva creates a striking visual parallel between these pristine constellations of ice set against the river’s deep blue waters and a starry night sky. This existential powerfully summons the sense of helplessness elicited by the climate crisis.
Indeed, although Eveline Boulva’s natural landscapes are devoid of any human representations, they are dotted with subtle allusions to human intervention in the territory. This is notably reflected by the recurrent use of grid and line motifs. The grid, intimately associated with cartography, becomes in the artist’s works the symbol of the complex relationship that human beings maintain with the territory. Faced with the immensity of the land, they attempt to make it intelligible by imposing artificial divisions and borders. More than mere geographical markers, these man-made constructions embody the eternal quest for control by humans over the space surrounding them, regardless of the potential consequences of this endeavor on the environment and its ecosystems.
As for the horizontal line, a constitutive element of representation, these are created by the vector technology that Boulva has been using for some years to lighten the meticulous work required by hyperrealist drawing. The perfectly straight line, absent in nature and thus uniquely “human”, contrasts with the organic forms of the natural landscapes depicted, establishing a visual tension in the works and a symbolic manifestation of the environmental equilibrium disruption caused by human beings. Moreover, in some works, the line randomly varies in thickness, or seems to be brought to the forefront of the composition when it is tinted with yellows, reds and oranges, whose warm tones contrast with the cool colors of the northern landscapes in the background. These are, in fact, visual manifestations of digital malfunctions of the vector machine, programming flaws, in other words, technological and technical “errors” that Boulva not only embraces, but deliberately provokes by pushing the machine beyond its current capabilities. These voluntary “anomalies” are thus a fundamental element of her artistic process, symbolizing both global warming through the warm colors superimposed on the ice landscapes, and the sense of loss of control and imbalance faced by human beings in the context of the climate crisis, itself caused by an endless series of “human errors” perpetuated to this day.
