Madeleine and I | Marc Séguin under the reign of beauty

In Madeleine and IMarc Séguin recounts his pilgrimage through the work of Ozias Leduc. We met him at the Saint-Enfant-Jésus church in Mile End, partly decorated by the man who allowed him to renew his faith in art.

“People rarely come here for the good Lord. They come here for the beauty.” In a few words, the caretaker of the Saint-Enfant-Jésus church in Mile End, Marc-André Brunet, unwittingly sums up an important part of the message of Madeleine and IMarc Séguin’s most recent book, his tenth.

On this Tuesday afternoon, we are in this alcove of serious and patient beauty that is the Sacré-Cœur chapel, which is accessed through a discreet door at the bottom of the altar, a room decorated between 1917 and 1919 by Ozias Leduc (1864-1955) in homage to the quarry workers and farmers who founded what was once called the village of Saint-Louis-du-Mile-End.

Although several parts of it have been altered – overpainted is the correct word – following clumsy restoration work undertaken in the 1960s, Marc Séguin enters here with the same piety that permeates his entire story. A piety whose object of devotion would not be the Holy Trinity, but the attentive and shimmering work of a Leduc who has always known how to restore to the symbols of a too often austere Catholicism their share of sensuality, of mystery.

“I’m not sure he was that religious,” says the painter and writer about the man nicknamed the wise man of Saint-Hilaire. It was by chance that he came across a reproduction of one of his paintings, Repentant Madeleineand by experiencing a shock of an ascendant which overturns and elevates with the same momentum, he will embark on a journey through the imagination of the artist and several churches where he left his mark.

Marc Séguin cranes his neck to solemnly examine the four Leduc canvases surrounding the dome of the Saint-Enfant-Jésus church in Mile End and imagines the man, well into his fifties, perched on scaffolding that is probably rickety, personally sticking his works to the ceiling.

What does he admire most about the man to whom he has devoted a few seasons of his life? “His 70 years of inexhaustible creativity. To get up in the morning and climb scaffolds, you have to be motivated,” he says, before starting to think out loud, in a tone that is always very gentle, as if to remind himself of something fundamental about himself.

“I don’t do what I do in life for the money, but because when I’m locked in my business, I experience a freedom and a euphoria that don’t exist elsewhere. And I suspect it was the same for Mr. Leduc.”

The habit of ruins

Back in the chapel, Marc Séguin takes a photo with his phone of some details stenciled on the walls, including a series of wheat flowers. “Beauty is not enough to guarantee immortality,” he writes in Madeleine and Ian observation that tends to confirm the undoubtedly too modest place that Ozias Leduc’s work occupies today in the collective memory of Quebec.

That he painted only a small number of easel paintings partly explains his timid presence in museum collections. But in more than 30 churches and chapels in Quebec, Nova Scotia and the eastern United States, his work is offered to anyone who dares to cross the threshold.

Which is not always so simple, given the complicated relationship between the Church and Quebecers who, in the wake of the Quiet Revolution, “flushed the toilet on worship and liturgy, but also let this relationship with beauty pass through,” observes Séguin.

Another obstacle to our collective reappropriation of these places: some of them lack love, which is the case of the Saint-Enfant-Jésus church in Mile End and its peeling walls, which the janitor Marc-André takes care of as best he can. No services are held there, due to the lack of a priest, and the doors are generally locked, which is why Marc Séguin was unable to access it while writing his story.

The title of Marie-Hélène Voyer’s important essay The habit of ruins (Lux) comes to mind. “It’s true that we’re getting used to it,” regrets Séguin, “and I find that scandalous.”

“Getting out of the dung heap”

Even if he does not speak of a mortal’s faith in a deity with a face bitten by a long beard, Madeleine and I is a book that speaks of a faith. A lively faith, although always subject to the elements: that of Marc Séguin towards art.

“Humiliated” is the word he remembers using as he left the church of Saint-Hilaire. Humiliated in the sense of humility, “made humble in the face of so much work, grace, determination and talent,” he writes.

“It pisses me off that my admiration makes me doubt myself,” he confides. “I see something fabulous and I tell myself that I’m just a booger. But I’ve already tried to convince myself that I’m always right, and every time I’ve gone in that direction, I’ve always failed. Lamentably. Shamefully. I have to live with the fact that when I create, I don’t know what it’s worth. Because doubt is essential to an artist’s life.”

But what is beauty? At Mile End Church, the question itself finds its answer everywhere you look.

“I would say that it is a feeling that arises from something that we have difficulty explaining, but that seems essential to us,” replies Marc Séguin. “It is an ordering that points to something greater than the everyday. It is perhaps what can reconnect us to the idea of ​​living, which helps us to reconcile ourselves with the hatred, the misunderstandings that we can have about the world.”

He pauses, as if afraid of being taken for a crank. “Forget everything I just said: beauty is what reminds me, every time I see it, that it is possible to get out of the dung heap.”

Madeleine and Iin bookstores September 25

Madeleine and I

Marc Seguin

Lemeac

120 pages