Two years after my last projeect, Empire, presented in Montreal at Usine C and at the Lacerte art contemporain gallery, as well as in Quebec at the defunct Galerie Michel Guimont, I’m back in Montreal with a new series : 8 large square paintings painted between 2021 and 2023. 30 years after my first exhibition in Montreal, at Foufounes Électriques, these paintings aim to question my processes and language. Exhibited for the first time, the paintings appear as a confrontation. The different gestures, spots and ways of painting work to concentrate the “energy” of the painting, to create a spontaneous and centered composition. Displaying varied patterns, the backgrounds give each painting a different atmosphere. Gestures, drawn contours, colored impasto are taken from paintings from different periods. The series thus revisits different moments of my practice in quotations: landscapes and theater settings are incorporated into the compositions.
The origin of this series, as banal as life, is the long illness, then the death of my mother, and the mourning that followed. In a sustained practice, organized by successive projects, which has followed a coherent trajectory for 30 years, this tragedy has disrupted the order and evacuated everything else. The practice of painting, the personalization of the “approach”, the quest for visibility constitute my daily life but seem meaningless in the face of the void left by tragedy.
Born from the vain desire to give meaning to what has no meaning, the paintings were created without a “program”. Usually working with inspiring texts, in relation to the human sciences (Empire, by Hardt & Negri, 2000, which evokes the financial changes of the end of the 20th century) or to literary works (King Lear, by Shakespeare, series painted in 2011 , or The Fall, by Camus, series from 2008), this series found in the idea of the ordeal a meaning, an “agencement”, suitable and poetic.
The term ordeal designates a divine judgment by the elements. It is a very old form of judgment where the accused must undergo an ordeal, the outcome of which is often their death. In its most common form, the ordeal is a duel to the death. But cruel versions have circulated which tell of the terrible reality of the worlds of superstition. Thus the ordeal by fire, where the accused must take burning brands in his hands and miraculously heal to prove their innocence. Or the water test where a woman accused of witchcraft must sink into icy water to prove that she is innocent, and thereby die. The notions of ordeal and tragic destiny contained in the ordeal seem to me to echo my absurd ordeal.
It is an ode to painting and drawing which attempts to convey all the violence and sadness of an ordeal from which we do not emerge unscathed, life.