2012-2013
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ORANGE 4th edition. Les mangeurs
Two places
- EXPRESSION : 495, avenue Saint-Simon, Saint-Hyacinthe
- LA RESSOURCERIE : 1095, 1135 et 1165, ave. Laframboise, Saint-Hyacinthe
ORANGE, the Contemporary Art Event of Saint-Hyacinthe, is entering its fourth edition. It is now possible to speak of a triennial event which judiciously amalgamates agri-food and contemporary art. For this edition, the curators have taken as their starting point the observation that without food, living things would die. Behind this obvious fact lies the close connection between food and death.
This two-fold concern on the part of the event’s curators – death and food in human existence – soon gave rise to a subtle shift in the topic addressed by orange 2012. Here, food on its own has been forsaken somewhat in favour of those who swallow it. Hence the event’s title, Les Mangeurs. Approaching its topic at a remove from foodstuffs, orange 2012 explores instead the question of those who eat, their condition as mortals and their complex relationship with food. As little as we may think about it, the survival action called eating we perform daily brings us face to face with our instincts and our animal nature. The consumption of food by this mortal body we paradoxically wish to be immortal also, however, brings us to two kinds of behaviour, the individual and the collective. In the former case, that of the private body, we might think of our comforting habits, but also of our anxieties and obsessions around the act of nourishment. The latter case, that of the social body, includes commemorations, celebrations, sacrifices, offerings and rituals.
Need and fatality. Approached separately or together, food and death have always interested artists, clearly fascinated by these fundamental concepts characteristic of human beings. The paths the curators explore and the hypotheses they raise find their moorings in the work of the nineteen artists invited to participate, who extend the scope of these thoughts through diverse and astonishing practices full of contrasts and subtleties.
Opening on Saturday, September 10, at 3pm
La foi du collectionneur
Marc Séguin: La foi du collectionneur: this exhibition samples the fruits of the artistic attachment of the highly passionate and committed collectors who support the career of this fascinating artist about whom opinion is divided.
A painter of the failures of a human race that is both demiurge and self-destructive, of the failures of history and our contemporary mythologies, Marc Séguin transfigures an often menacing and hostile reality by charging it with a sublime quality which gives his work great symbolic power. Demonstrating his interest in the sacred and the political, Marc Séguin depicts and magnifies certain events and actors in our contemporary history in images in which seduction and repulsion exist side by side. Their expressive power is rendered through a technique that combines schematic sketch, photographic realism and traces of his gestures, in compositions marked by an economy of means, in particular chromatic.
This selection of Marc Séguin’s work, drawn from the collections of eagle-eyed connoisseurs, but also from spontaneous acquisitions arising out of personal loves, conveys the essential aspects of his artistic project over the past fifteen years.
A travelling exhibition organised by the Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides in collaboration with the Simon Blais gallery.
Opening and presentation on Saturday, November 10, at 2pm
Vraisemblances
Produced by EXPRESSION, the exhibition Vraisemblances will also be presented at the Musée Régional de Rimouski from 16 June to 15 September 2013. It will be accompanied by a monograph co-published by the two institutions.
Isabelle Hayeur, a photographer, maker of verisimilar images and an artist of both poetry and social commitment, is known for her landscapes employing large-format photo-montage, video and in situ installation. In a caprice of language, “landscape” can refer to both a work of art and the physical space it depicts. In that case, can one create an image of a non-existent landscape? It’s an ambiguity which sits well with the project of this Quebec artist who skilfully fashions credible images out of her imagination. The two-stage reception of these works invites us, first of all, to perceive the seductive side of these plausible landscapes, and then to grasp that we are in the presence of composite images which sometimes join several fragments of diverse origin. In the face of these finely-crafted photo-montages, seeds of doubt are sown in the viewer’s mind. Introducing this notion of doubt to the photograph itself – which summons in turn the critical sense of the maker, the viewer and the viewed – constitutes a significant shift in our perception of this means of grasping reality, which until quite recently had been seen as the ultimate method for establishing a fact. As a result, photography as a form of certitude is ruled out of Hayeur’s work, something that does not prevent her, on the contrary, from embarking on an intense search for truth founded on the need to become aware of what lies hidden beneath the surface. In short, landscape in Isabelle Hayeur’s work becomes presentation rather than representation, and photography is no longer – was it ever? – a synonym of evidence and certitude.
This exhibition presented at EXPRESSION, entitled Vraisemblances, presents a series of photographs and videos made over a ten-year period, from 2003 to 2012. The exhibition will include new work and other previously exhibited work taken from the series Destination, Maisons modèles and Underworlds.
Presentation on Saturday, January 10, 2013 at 2pm
Opening \ Launch on Saturday, January 10, at 3pm
Un maître et ses élèves devenus artistes
Looking at the work of André Robert, one recognises European, American and Quebec influences, references to high moments in the visual arts. One thinks in particular of Vasarely’s Optical Art, Warhol’s Pop Art, psychedelic painting, Impressionism and Pointillism. The drawing is mastered, the proportions irreproachable, the way the weight is balanced is striking, and most of the time the line is curved to the point that one can easily imagine the artist’s gesture, the flick of his wrist typical of his work, being felt by the viewer like a sensation of movement, of rotation. From the beginning of his career, André Robert has worked with a solid familiarity with the great painters – Goya, Bosch, Cézanne, Matisse, Renoir, Seurat – and the avant-garde painters – Braque, Picasso. Here, we see the influence of Van Gogh; there, Pollock’s drippings, although Robert does not use the dripping technique, but rather his faithful narrow brush. Closer to home, we should remark that Riopelle and Pellan were part of his field of exploration. Today we find in the studio of this accomplished painter and prolific artist, in the basement of his Maskoutain home, an impressive number of abstract and figurative works created over a long period, the oldest among them dating to the early 1960s. In 2012, at the age of 72, he is still painting. Despite the fact that his fingers no longer obey him with as much docility as before, he creates large abstract paintings in which the gestures for which he is known can be seen.
This exhibition at EXPRESSION pays tribute to an artist and teacher who, in the 1970s, infected three students at the Saint-Hyacinthe seminary who today, each in their own way, have become artists with undeniable recognition from their peers: Dominique Gaucher, Éric Lamontagne and Claude Millette. The decision to hang the work in a manner reminiscent of an eighteenth-century Salon also enables us to present a few works by “young artists” amongst the multitude of works by the “master” who inspired in his students a taste for creating works of art.
Presentation on Saturday, May 25, 2013 at 2pm
Opening / Launch on Saturday, May 25, at 3pm