From July 12 to August 27 2006
EXPO GALERIE 2000
Palais des Congrès De Montréal
1001, Pl. Jean-Paul Riopelle
Montréal, Québec
Canada, H2Z 1M2
Tel: 514-868-6668
[email protected]
METRO Place d'Armes
Movements at the crossroads
by: Pierre-Antoine Tremblay
War breaks out between different ideologies and creates new movements. Museums, galleries and art dealers divide artists into different categories which, according to them, have nothing in common Impressionist, abstract, modern, plastic, landscape, cubist, naive, contemporary, animal, etc. The market divides the different movements, which seems senseless to me because collectors reunite them in their collections. The artists presented in this exhibition are those who have experienced the division of movements in different periods. Sometimes applauded, humiliated, wandering, dispossessed, offended, abandoned, reinstated, rejected, manipulated, eternal victims of a man-made conflict, I believe that, having lived below the poverty line, they certainly would not want the work they have imagined to be used for politically incorrect purposes. In a conflict identified with a historical, even a metaphysical condition of technique, the artist draws upon his heritage images to produce a vision of a being representing the history of a society, a period of life, which the museums applaud, humiliate, dispossess, offend, abandon, reinstate, reject, manipulate, to suit their executives taste. The artists takes his image from the image to make it his own and give meaning to a being who had a heart, a foreshadowing of the unforeseen. The artist had imagined it because his focus on his present, the guarantor of his past, tells the story quite simply, in his own way.
These men and women, artists immortalized by their works, would see nothing tragic, I believe, in each others paintings. In a timeless vision, pioneers ahead of their time, they made it possible for art to evolve, influence, motivate, transpose and inspire, but certainly not to divide. The painters studio where the work rests during its creation is only an intermission between two trips through time, an illusory intermezzo, a respite in which artists scarcely believe, in any case not to the extent of allowing their identities to be stolen, even though they are brought together by the exhibition. Their works each remain in their forlornness, solitude and vulnerability as in an old-time studio, as if there were no possible contact between them, as if they are in the state of powerlessness and happiness between mother and child. The colours in turn come to life, are galvanized, interpenetrate, and the strokes become more nervous, more disorderly, from our perspective, because they are more emotional and more alive, and the chromatic simplification of yesteryear acquires more complexity. The work of these masters of a profound richness of expression, variety and remarkable freedom of writing jointly touches us. It amounts to a real crossroads of movements, from the pictorial approach to the changes of palette that are henceforth associated in space-time. From the fictitious work to the figurative, passing through abstraction in a dynamic composition, as if electrified by a tragedy or unexpected happiness, as in the past, these works are both a retrospective and a premonition.
This is why any facility, any seduction is rejected, beyond their pictorial qualities. It is through these qualities that Antoine, Ayotte, Barbeau, Beaulieu, Bellefleur, Belzile, Bouchard, Bressan, Bruni, Brymner, Coburn, Cosgrove, Suzor-Coté, Cutts, Delsignore, Favreau, Ferron, Fortin, Gagnon, Giunta, Hallam, Hammond, Harris, Hébert, Jackson, Jacobi, Jérome, Frère Jérome, Johnston, Lemieux, Le Sauteur, Letendre, Macdonald, Masson, McEwen, Pellan, Pépin, Perrigard, Perron, Picher, Poirier, Richard, Riopelle, Rochon, Rousseau, Roberts, Scott, Sherriff-Scott, Smith, Soulikias, Surrey, Tatossian, Théberge, Toupin, Vaillancourt, Verner, have transposed their messages.
More than ever in 2006, these painters bear witness to their times, each in turn. During their stays at Fine Arts college, or Beaux-arts or in the school of life, the painters have explored every genre and every school: polished academic portraits, still life, nudes, street scenes, sometimes abstract, sometimes impressionistic, a little cubist or totally devoid of figuration, sometimes executed with the brush, the blade or the spatula. For each of them, these constant searches have directed their different ways of brushing the canvas, spreading colour and expressing themselves. For over 200 years, their methods of learning were uniform: deliberate impasto, fleshing out the subject with planes emphasized with heightening effects and glazes. Painting the life of the 18th century peasantry, the poverty and hard labour of the 19th or the abstract of the 20th, or the surrealist picture from the beginning of time, each artist has sought to leave a little of his or her own story. The ambience is present and the air circulates in each of their works the message is transmitted from generation to generation. Keen observers, each in their own way, they express the activities of their world on their canvases. During their lifetime, they participate in exhibitions, listen to a multitude of comments, seem to hear but only listen to themselves, and remain unique.
Bearing their history lightly, they are among the rare Canadian painters, better known on the international scene, to have devoted their entire lives to perfecting the talent and genius they are unanimously recognized to have possessed from their artistic infancy. Over 200 years of history have passed, yet we are still making new discoveries through their works. There is something there to satisfy and give happiness to every self-critical esthete who rejects orthodoxy and finds well-being only in intellectual rigour and in the desire to outdo oneself.
As for history, thats a completely different story. As privileged witnesses of nearly all the social transformations since the beginning of the 19th or 20th century, successively influenced by the masters of different contemporary epochs, they recount their life and their contradictions through their works, which also reveal the history of Quebec and Canada, their expectations, their struggles and their demands.
What a dilemma! Some scions of families who settled in Canada shortly before their birth, others born of parents native to this country, others immigrants themselves, confronted from their adolescence with situations of conflict from which they would emerge matured and hardened. Erudite and refined, but sometimes marginal men, who practised a modest but honourable trade as painters. Around them they saw the shining promise of professions as doctors, lawyers, accountants or architects, their brothers and friends bound for highly prestigious careers, yet they decided to leave their own mark on our history through their art.
They thus firmly objected to the pretended passion of the people around them for design and colour, and made art their trade. History shows us that most of these painters, their trade being what it was, probably made no direct normal contribution to support their families. At several times in their lives, they reconsidered their vocation in search of a better future and more promising skies, but resisted this temptation. Yes, what a dilemma for these respectful sons of patriarchal authority, heirs of their roots. Moreover, they were unable to understand what drove them, where these deep-rooted motivations came from. It was thus with uncertainty in the soul, but also with a certain stubborn persistence, that they would be recognized, throughout their lives, for the dream pitted against the destinies they made for themselves, a dream of creation that was their only way out.
Later in their respective careers, it would be with the same quiet but so irrevocable determination that they would also oppose all those mandarins of art, all those starched connaisseurs who claimed that they should orient their career to more commercial works, or unify or categorize them. Once again, their creativity would have the last word.
They would face an even more heart-rending conflict, one that would affect their creations the categorization of genres after an artistic career of 20, 30, 40, 50 or even 60 years and a life dedicated to their art. They would have to categorize themselves. Yet they were constantly obsessed with the desire to experiment, to shatter these impediments of academicism, to say everything, to go farther, if not to outdo themselves. Sometimes they would be stunned to discover that the genre itself involved its own limits. After a long period of reflection, they would decide to remain true to themselves with all that this entailed.
Today, I want to give their works a chance to express themselves fully without categorization, without being concerned about fashions, public, museum or commercial opinion, or even criticism.
Here is the exhibition: MOVEMENTS AT THE CROSSROADS
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