From her old black and white photographs to her recent color shots, Raymonde April offers a whole journey – in time or in the evolution of her work. The exhibition Crossingwhich brings together almost half a century of images, from 1973 to 2020, more precisely, is however much more than that.
This retrospective at the 1700 La Poste center is not one. The raw material may certainly date, but the series that feed on it carry 2022 as the year of production. Apart from the question of time, there are many bridges to pass from one image to another. Including within the same image.
The leap is geographical, between the landscapes of Bas-Saint-Laurent and scenes in India. The journey can take on a relational value, because both friendship and sharing or collective work transpire from almost each of the compositions. The movement also has an introspective dimension, given the number of self-portraits with closed eyes that punctuate the exhibition.
The image that welcomes visitors is, in this sense, a wonderful gateway to the world of Raymonde April. Untitled, February 18, 2013 (2014) shows the artist in profile, her eyes not closed here (do we really know?), but hidden by her hair. She appears in the foreground, mysterious, in front of a series of walls that evoke an enclosed space. A small breakthrough of light, however, invites us to consider this self-portrait, and the entire exhibition, as something other than a surface view, than a simple overview of the life of an artist.
As Gwynne Fulton points out in one of the texts of the rich monograph published for the occasion, “there is a double imperative in [l’]work [d’April] : passively documenting and actively inventing”. In other words, if the images retrace lived moments, they have a poetic significance. Without the obligation to know or recognize the places and people well identified in the legends, everyone has the freedom to see their own story. Captive and active, the public.
With this winner of the 2003 Borduas Prize (nearly 20 years ago), each photograph, however personal it may be, can fit into any puzzle. As much as a set has the air of an album of memories, like new friendshipsimpressive group of 88 prints drawn from the years 1970 to 1990, as much the narrative thread, even the chronological continuation, seems arbitrary.
This is April’s signature. Like his previous projects, vast in images or stories — the film Embrace it all (2000) or the exhibition Equivalences 1-4 (2010), to name a few —, Crossing is divided into chapters. 1700 La Poste has been put to good use.
On the ground floor, all new friendships, subdivided into sections, surrounds seven self-portraits from different eras. The journey here is technical: gelatin prints alongside inkjet prints, a good part of which stems from the digitization of old negatives found by the artist. The revival, or re-reading, of these visual documents attests to the creative process.
The other spaces in the center of rue Notre-Dame Ouest are devoted to projects related to stays in India held since the experience of a studio-residence in 2012. The eleven images of the title work Crossing occupy the mezzanine, while mumbai diary and his twenty-two prints have been placed in the basement, where the documentary on the artist is projected, a habit of 1700 La Poste entrusted to the filmmaker Bruno Boulianne.
The piece de resistance of the expo, Inferno, Mazgoon, January 22, 2013 (2015), is in the “safe” of the building. It’s a huge book that you activate, literally, since you have to manipulate the twenty-two images that make it up.
Parade a very particular routine, that of a woman brought to burn plastic residues. In front of the mixture of fire, smoke and rays of the sun, the artist comments, perhaps more explicitly than elsewhere, on the degree of danger posed to part of the world’s population by the production of goods and their consumption. Raymonde April reveals herself not only crossed by her Indian friendships, but also entirely inhabited by their presence, their fate, their daily life.