When I find myself pushing open the heavy glass doors of the Montreal Museum of Fine Art’s Contemporary Art Square, I am admittedly apprehensive. I’ve never been drawn to contemporary art pieces, often finding that they lean so esoteric as to feel alienating. My expectation for Anri Sala’s piece, Ravel Ravel Interval (2017), is the same.
When I enter, and the door slams shut behind me, I am greeted by a dark hallway and the delicate sound of piano beckoning me forward. Entranced by the music, my cynicism seems to dissolve in an instant. As I continue to walk down the hallway, the piano gets progressively louder. I reach a doorway at the end of the tunnel and am met with an open room containing two projector screens with a two-metre gap between them.
The screens feature two hands; one belonging to Montreal pianist Louis Lortie and the other to French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet, playing Maurice Ravel’s Left Hand in D Major (1929-1930). The concerto is a one-handed piece commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein, a pianist who lost his right arm in the First World War.
I enter the room and sit on one of the benches in front of the piece. The projector screens are translucent, which allows viewers to see both hands playing simultaneously. Sala’s camera work is intimate, capturing the concerto at eye level with the pianos’ keys. The two disembodied hands begin their ghostly melody in sync, dancing about the ivory as if performing a pas de deux.
As they continue to play, the hands grow separate from one another: While Lortie tickles the low keys, Bavouzet is on the opposite side of his screen, striking the high ones. Even though both pianists play the same piece, their motions are entirely different. In certain moments, one hand will pause on a rest that the other has yet to reach, while the other continues alone, the orchestra shifting into an impromptu solo. The unique playing styles of both artists become noticeable in the observable distance between them, highlighting the divergences that define the breadth of human creativity. The notes of the pair of pianos tumble against each other as both artists align and separate, providing a layered melody that embodies the stratified nature of individuals within a society.
Eventually, an unseen orchestra joins both pianists; dramatic strings and delicate winds intensify the piece’s pathos. As someone not well-versed in either orchestra or contemporary art, I am shocked by Sala’s piece’s enrapturing quality as I sit facing a combination of the aforementioned forms. The close-up shots make one feel present in the playing of Ravel’s concertos, the distant yet equally visible players allowing viewers a certain level of agency in which pianist’s rendition they wish to participate. Sala pans out as the music reaches its crescendo to feature a broader view of the piano while the orchestra booms in the background.
The volume and speed of the pianists’ playing rope you in before the experience seemingly ends in a quick cut to both artists’ hands hanging limp, their pianos absent. After following the piece’s life through wavering trills and sharp notes, this feels almost like a death.
Suddenly, the stillness is interrupted by both hands waving slowly as the orchestra recommences. Sala then cuts to the beginning of Ravel’s Left Hand in D Major, and the whole piece starts anew. As I exit the room and back out the dark hallway, I feel that I—similarly to the two pianists—am experiencing a fresh beginning: A positive relationship with a previously dismissed art movement. Anri Sala’s Ravel Ravel Interval is the perfect exhibit for those wishing to be pulled vigorously into the sphere of contemporary art. Once you open those doors, there is no going back.
Anri Sala’s Ravel Ravel Interval is on display at the MMFA until Apr. 27. Tickets are both available online and in person. (Free for those aged 25 and under).
