Marie-Noëlle Boutin - 'Visages agricoles'

Marie-Noëlle Boutin’s work already forms part of Contretype’s permanent collection following her year as artist-in-residence in 2011-2012. This exhibition, entitled “Agricultural Faces”, includes a series of view camera photos and a video installation. The photos were commissioned by the Centre national des arts plastiques (CNAP, the French National Centre for the Plastic Arts) in 2016, as part of a government youth project. They are a continuation of the “Territories of Youth” portfolio created by Boutin in the preceding years. For these photos, she concentrated on students at an agricultural college in the Hauts-de-France Region (formerly the regions of Picardie and Nord-Pas-de-Calais), which is where she was born and grew up. This personal, emotional knowledge informed her approach to tackling the relationships between the students and the agricultural sector they were preparing to work in; the environment they were training in; their tools and machines; the techniques they were learning and the animals they were working with. She thus records the period between the end of their training and studies and the start of their future careers. The video installation associated with these photos immerses its audience in this world, only rarely explored by artists. The sounds and movements extend the fixed images in the photos and reveal the physical involvement of the subjects in the landscape in which the college is set. It is more than a completed project, rather, through the creation of several sequences, it introduces a new phase of work for Boutin, dedicated to rural life, in which she uses new techniques, making it a sort of apprenticeship for her too.

Danielle Leenaerts
Translation: Chris Bourne