“In downtown, a new mural pays tribute to a major cultural figure in Montreal: the photographer Gabor Szilasi! It was created by muralist Rafael Sottolichio on a wall belonging to Concordia University, where Mr. Szilasi taught for many years. Nearly 100,000 photos taken by Gabor throughout his life serve as a testament to the evolution of society and architecture, primarily in Montreal and Quebec’s regions.

In collaboration with him and his family, MU honors his contribution to Quebec photography by reproducing two of his iconic photographs. His self-portrait, positioned above a photo of a winter scene, highlights his extensive work as a portraitist. The large photograph, featuring people bundled up waiting for the bus, is titled “Tempête de neige” and was taken in 1971 during the storm of the century, in the same area as the mural. Gabor Szilasi visited the MU team on-site during the creation of the mural.

Art assistants : Amina Mandour, Julian Palma and Nhu Y Ho.” — Mu

I was invited to participate in a project by my good friends at Mu. A mural in homage to famous montreal photographer Gabor Szilasi. Gabor Szilasi, like Bertrand Carrière and Serge Clément, opened my eyes, in my younger years, to a way of seeing the world as the magical spectacle of everyday life. With them, I was introduced to street photography and began to see the world as a source of wonder. Their works tell stories, and I should do the same.

At the same time, my encounter with Susan Sontag’s famous book On Photography introduced me to the “Image World” she describes so well. I was more than ready to receive all her ideas. Studying art at the time when figurative painting was particularly poorly perceived in educational and exhibition institutions, I developed a painting practice whose theoretical issues were more akin to photography than to painting. Art history, semiology, philosophy, and sociology followed, but the strong debt to Susan Sontag only recently became apparent to me. It appeared like a photograph in the red light of the darkroom, immersed in the developer, emerging from the void.

At the center of the mural, a very faithful reproduction of the photo is done using various ways of painting Inspired by classical painters Diego Velázquez and William Turner, I developed in my early yeats as a painter, a way of painting the world full of accidents and gray areas. Just as Gabor tells stories by photographing, I wanted to tell stories by painting pictures.

This mural and all the encounters surrounding its production triggered a change in my painting. At the time, I was inspired by Bruno Latour’s notion of the “new climate actor”, and started a series of paintings depicting interiors in a state of deconstruction. But I grew a deep desire to review all my photos, all my archives, and paint these pictures instead.