The other day, reading in a subway car, I was challenged by my seatmate. A North African with burning eyes. He had read over my shoulder and found fascinating what his gaze deciphered on travels, interbreeding, belonging and migration.
— Can I photograph the cover? he asked me, so he could get hold of it.
– Oh yes. You should like it!
I read Territories of the Americas, interviews of the artist René Derouin with Patrick Bossé, director of the immersive film of the same name on this man and his work. The full published interview painted a fascinating and rigorous portrait of the character. René Derouin is of a nomadic species, like the old runners in the woods, at whom the sedentary people cast a dark look while secretly envying their freedom.
So, I spoke to my unexpected neighbor about this Quebec artist, rooted in Val-David while keeping one foot in Mexico, in love with Americanness, having lived in Tokyo, Paris, Barcelona and having traveled the world. 50 years of creation through times and places with its soles of wind. Sculptor, painter, engraver, ceramist, author.
I had already written about him, because he inspires me. I like his works of beauty and generosity, his social commitment, his figure of otherness, his words against the grain of the surrounding discourse. Many Quebec artists are nationalists. Not him, except in his own way. His eyes embrace territories larger than the St. Lawrence Valley: from the pole to Mexico.
During the 1980s, before his exhibition on nordicity at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, testifying to his journey, he felt at home in internal exile: “Because no one understood what I was doing. Especially in the world of art and the history of Quebec art. He was the apostle of Nordicity which also testified to the South, without creating the abstract forms then in vogue. An enigma in the eyes of many compatriots.
With the upcoming revision of the laws on the status of the artist, those who wear several hats will be better protected to create with us. But Derouin is the fruit of another world, which I want to bear witness to today. Because it approaches singular perspectives, stuck to a tradition of resourcefulness which also had its beauties. This breeding ground of craftsmen, present at each stage of a work, from creation to manufacture of the cases, was that of the pioneers and his.
He worked so often without subsidies, struggling to find his place. His training will generally be acquired outside the framework, on the job. At 86, René Derouin has had time to know many political reigns, including that of Duplessis. Gone up hill and down dale, turning his back on the river where his brother and father had drowned, rolling over the land of America and its northern areas, he is the engraver of rites of passage, migrants and birds of prey. which circle around before swooping down on their prey. Influenced by Mexican muralists, also founder of the Precambrian Gardens in Val-David, where each tree speaks from the ground, this former friend of Gaston Miron, this unrepentant traveler allergic to all walls, nevertheless feels he belongs and is transmitted.
So, beyond the course of his life and his work, I have followed in this book the thread of his reflections. As a young man, he looked back on our story of Conquest and abandonment, promising himself: “It’s over! This heavy bag, he no longer wanted to carry it, but he embraced his roots all the same, far from the self-contempt from which so many Quebecers suffer. “In the years of the Quiet Revolution, we experienced a rejection of the manual, of the handmade and of what we had been,” he recalls. Our lines experienced a break that he sought to transcend. “I’m not bitter, adds René Derouin faced with the wind of globalization. I am not nostalgic for the past, but I am vigilant. You will have to work hard. Our children will have to be educated. »
In the mid-1960s, after a woodcut internship with a Japanese master, he returned to Quebec and saw Quebec creators waiting for subsidies. In his eyes, it was better to face the elements and the materials before calling for help. He never stopped sticking to it.
And while the fate of artists should improve after the adoption of the reform of the Quebec law (perfectible) governing their fate, I liked that René Derouin brings each creator back to basics: discovering his sources, breathing the air from everywhere, climb your mountain, find your style and your civic ethics, then enter yourself to translate the world by offering it your signature and your beauty.