This series is composed exclusively of oil paintings depicting photographs taken by the artist over the past 25 years. With varied motifs, the paintings present intimate moments, travel photos, landscapes, portraits, and studio moments. Like a journey through a private photo album, the collection evokes the passage of time and the ephemeral nature of things. The reliquary and Sic Transit are terms that evoke the essentially spiritual aspect of our relationship to time, to the world, to and art.
When I started this series, inspired by my image bank, my collection of photos, I was working on another project, inspired by the notion of “actor” as presented by french philosopher Bruno Latour. This idea led me to interesting images, but I had an encounter. Beth Leblonc, a coworker in a set design studio, a young figurative painter whose work deeply touched me. When I saw her paintings, small oil paintings of 8 x 10 in., made from her photos, painted simply, without artifice, it reminded me of my beginnings as a painter and my relationship with photography. I saw myself again at 20 years old, fascinated by photography but especially overwhelmed by reading “On Photography” by Susan Sontag (1977). Having practiced photography since a young age, practice due to an architect father fascinated by photography and willing to regularly print our images, this reading was an epiphany for my photographic mind, my taste for the archive.
It is through this text that for the first time my own relationship with images became evident, took shape. It triggered a self-criticism about my relationship with photography that still inspires me. Upon recent rereading, the ideas are still as strong, but the world has changed. At the moment, it is rather the American spirit of this text that moves me, I think, this propensity to think of the world as completely modern, with no attachments to the past. It is also a question of this archivist, this collector who appears with the world of consumption, fascinated by extreme poverty as well as by ostentatious luxury to escape his “average” condition, this photographer-hunter who always places himself outside the action, always overlooking, and who ends up having no hold on reality beyond his archive.
What I remember most is the texture of the language, terms like:
«the camera is the ideal arm of consciousness in its acquisitive mode» (In Plato’s Cave)
«Fewer and fewer Americans possess objects that have a patina, old furniture, grandparents’ pots and pans-the used things, warm with generations of human touch, that Rilke celebrated in The Duino Elegies as being essential to a human landscape. Instead, we have our paper phantoms, transistorized landscapes. A featherweight portable museum.» (Melancholy Objects)
«As the taking of photographs seems almost obligatory to those who travel about, the passionate collecting of them has special appeal for those confined–either by choice, incapacity, or coercion-to indoor space. Photograph collections can be used to make a substitute world, keyed to exalting or consoling or tantalizing images.»
«To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to reexperience the unreality and remoteness of the real.»
« This spurious unity of the world is effected by translating its contents int:o images. Images are always compatible, or can be made compatible, even when the realities they depict are not.»
«The production of images also furnishes a ruling ideology. Social change is replaced by a change in images. The freedom to consume a plurality of images and goods is equated with freedom itself.»
«But the force of photographic images comes from their being material realities in their own right, richly informative deposits left in the wake of whatever emitted them, potent means for turning the tables on reality-for turning it into a shadow.» (The Image World).
Rereading this text also brought me back to my own work at the time, to the melancholic mood of the end of the millennium, to the sense of transience that animated me then. At that time, I was trying to capture this spiritual sense of transience in empty landscapes with truncated horizons. In the end, my “American Landscapes” emerged from these reflections. Susan Sontag had something to do with this title.
My own recent series was not originally intended for a gallery exhibition, I was thinking more of an intimate studio exhibition, a small showroom, it was during the year 2024 that I received the offer to exhibit it at Chiguer Contemporain and I accepted. Originally I wanted to do a studio exhibition, with images, like Beth, inspired by photos that have been hanging on my walls forever, my “collection”… And Beth knows that she is my inspiration, we spoke about this. She also recently exhibited some very beautiful paintings in the hall of the Westmount greenhouses. Thank you Beth.