Nelson Henricks - Prix Robert-Forget 2024

In discussing his professional journey in the Introduction, Henricks reinterprets through text the recurring form of self-portraiture in his visual work. This eminently personal text evokes the artist’s incontestable sense of rhythm and composition, as well as the tone, deadpan humour and, essentially, the aesthetic, ethical and political approaches he uses in his work. This is followed by an essay written by Christine Ross in 1995 to accompany Henricks’ solo exhibition Je vais vous raconter une histoire de fantômes at OBORO. Ross’ text develops an in-depth analysis of a body of work made at the outset of the artist’s career, in which she considers invisibility as a mode of representation and revelation. This analysis is all the more interesting today because the videos examined for their aesthetics of disappearance have been fundamental to Henricks’ recognition. A figurehead of the Montréal visual and media arts community, he stood out – not without an irony that he himself must enjoy – for producing an image of himself that put into question the veracity of what we see before us.

In her exploration of a recent body of work, Maude Johnson considers the intertextual nature of Henricks’ works. Johnson uses a curatorial methodology to analyse Henricks’ discursive approaches. The author’s theoretical position echoes the artist’s overall practice, which includes writing, curating and teaching as ways of creating a narrative. Like assemblage or curatorial recontextualization, the plurality of discursive channels constitutes a dynamic force that not only amplifies the impact of Henricks’ work, but also his influence on subsequent generations. In his consideration of Emission (1994) and Don’t You Like the Green of A (2022), Vincent Bonin offers a radically condensed retrospective of a prolific production, focussing on actions, discourse, sounds and colors as means of expression. The author outlines an ‘autotheory’ like an invitation to continue the conversation with Jon Davies’ text. The latter explores the ‘queerness’ of Henricks’ work for its structure of opposition (self/other, artifice/authenticity, voice/body, word/image), which he sets in parallel with the materiality and social context of his work. In the essay’s conclusion, the analysis of voice and speech in Henricks’ works provides a surprisingly intimate portrait of the artist. Far from the effects of the concealment, subterfuge, performance and fragmentation of identities,¹ Nelson Henricks finally reveals himself. In plural.