Musique vierge is a series of nine digital prints done at the Centre Sagamie in Alma (Quebec) in 2012 and limited to an edition of 10.
The series presents blank musical staves created using paper cut from various magazines and newspapers. Only the narrow space used to separate articles has been used. In their original context, these spaces separate texts and help the reader understand that articles are discrete entities. They make the reader pause and create distance between words. These lines – a liminal space, a break in the narrative and the act of reading – form the essential material used in Musique vierge.
The lines cut from paper are of various colours, widths and lengths. In each of the series' works, the forms created and placed horizontally in groups of five form empty musical staves that emanate silence. The lines cut from negative space, areas devoid of text in the source periodicals, only deepens the silence.
The various forms and colours within the works set up a reading rhythm for the viewer who can decode the images as one might a text or musical score. The absence of words and musical diacritics allow him to imagine the sound as he hears it, at will. So, the series is both silent and melodious depending on the "reader". The clean aesthetic and the forms' washed out hues invite the viewer to pause and listen to the image before him.
In the Musique vierge series, Jérôme Fortin repurposes workaday objects. True to his artistic vision, he has delicately cut out, pasted and placed elements horizontally, transforming the ordinary and imbuing them with new meaning. The series forms part of the artist's ongoing work that, here, reinvents the familiar imagery of our daily lives and in the aural environment that surrounds us. Skilfully, he coaxes out the music playing in our heads.
