She arrives, sovereign, dressed all in black, but with silver sneakers on her feet, her white hair beautifully curled falling over her shoulders. Amused, laughing, Diane Dufresne revisits 80 years of her life in great strides at the Arsenal Art Contemporain, where an immersive exhibition retraces her work, from her first missal to today, via the pink madness that set the Olympic Stadium ablaze in 1984. She comes in a hundred costumes, skillfully presented, from the clown to the romantic, from the rocker to the thinker, from the hysteric to the thoughtful, with her voice that has taken her everywhere she wanted to go, and even a little further.
Diane Dufresne has crossed the decades, pedal to the metal, wind in her sails. She offered herself to the world, bare-breasted, painted with fleur-de-lis, from the time of Other than that, I feel fine.or draped in costumes from the simplest to the most sophisticated, an artist to her fingertips. Living in the moment, and assuming her great age, she thinks back on each stage, each show, with a smile and without nostalgia. “It’s like, sometimes, if you were in love, and now, it’s not there anymore. What does that do to you? We can’t always stay on that, and that belongs to the audience,” she says simply. This audience, she gave it everything.
Her prodigious collection of costumes, designed by Michel Robidas, Mario Davignon and Mario Di Nardo, to name just a few, almost went up in smoke when the diva’s apartment burned down in Little Burgundy in 1994.
Miraculously saved from the flames and water by the firefighters, these unique pieces, “prayers, works of art,” she says, made their way to the office of Richard Langevin, the spouse, guardian angel, and curator of the exhibition, until today. “I’ve been carrying around costumes, covers, boxes, archives, all that for 27 years,” says the main person concerned. Then we always ask ourselves: why are we doing this? And the answer today is: I did it to get to the Arsenal.”
An unsuspected designer
We know the singer with the prodigious voice and the stage beast, the eccentric subscriber to excess, but we know less the director, the show designer, whose every development is thought out to the nearest second, and which she has recorded in large notebooks blackened with careful writing. These notebooks, where the great shows that have been Top secret Or Pink magicfor example, you can see them under glass. “It’s all handwritten: the lighting, the pacingthe special effects, the sets, the costumes… Everything is written, with different color codes. So, Diane has designed everything for decades. It’s the same for the albums, but this is the first time we’re showing them a little bit,” says Richard Langevin.
Diane Dufresne’s personal archives have therefore been added to those collected over the years by the exhibition’s archivist, André Ruel, who has been tracking down every ticket to his idol’s show for decades.
“I have always directed, but I didn’t want to sign them because I wanted to make the public dream. To present it to them as if it were a gift from God,” says the diva, who admits to having once thought about becoming a nun.
Among her favorite costumes, Diane Dufresne thinks of that of Hold on, I’m comingfrom the early 1970s, in her first years of collaboration with Luc Plamondon. It was a tight jersey, which had shocked the French, with huge sequined boots that preceded her like goalie pads. “I always wanted to break all the taboos,” she says. “We weren’t far from priests, from confession all the time. I liked confession. I went there for fun.” Her songs then confront the taboos on homosexuality, on masturbation, on the cry itself, this great cry whose air she tore, “for all those who cannot cry.” Diane Dufresne’s mother, to whom the diva dedicated her show Pink magic, died when Diane Dufresne was 15 years old. The singer then left school to take care of her family, and was destined for a career as a singer. “Then, my father remarried a woman who was really very strict. We weren’t allowed to speak, we weren’t allowed to do this, we weren’t allowed to do that, we weren’t allowed to have any buddy. And then I went to study in France, that’s where it exploded,” she says.
Further on, “the room of monsters” is occupied by dozens of heads shaped by Diane, after she was initiated into the fine arts in the workshops of Brother Jérôme Paradis, who, despite his religious status, rubbed shoulders with the movement associated with Global refusal.
“We asked him what he listened to while painting and he said Diane Dufresne,” she recalls. He taught her to let her instincts run wild, not to try to make something beautiful. To the point that the artist even blindfolded herself while painting. When she created her characters, she said she felt joy. “However, I am not a joyful person,” she said.
Rocking in his grave
Even today, Diane Dufresne unwaveringly wades into the waters of old age, expressing its harms and benefits, she who will be 80 years old at the end of September. In one of the exhibition rooms, a mannequin representing her is lying in a swinging coffin, covered in ivy, a small nest with eggs on its belly. It is in this installation, co-created with Richard Langevin, that she says she wants to be buried. This swinging tomb, “was to remove the kind of fear that people always have with the grave. So, we made a swing, and the children had a lot of fun on it, swinging in a coffin, in Repentigny,” she says. Rebellious and defiant, to the end.
This is the first time that producer Paul Dupont-Hébert has presented an exhibition on a Quebec artist at the Arsenal Art Contemporain, having produced immersive exhibitions on Van Gogh and Monet there. But it may not be the last.