The artist Louise Robert died on November 7, just a few weeks before celebrating her 81st birthday. I mourn her as an artist and as a friend since I have been seeing her every day for six years to produce the catalog raisonné of her work. She was all about this process, because she often said, when commenting on a work or discovering a forgotten one, that she was revisiting her life story. The exercise delighted him while sometimes frightening him. In fact, his 50-year career—first works signed in 1969—registers him in the history of Quebec art with more than 1,600 works, 450 exhibitions and an impressive critical fortune.
You will recognize her paintings and drawings if I tell you that she sprinkled them with words, gleaned here and there as she read, to the point that she was described as “the most literary of artists in the visual arts”. She gave me the gift of leafing through her many notebooks, and I recognized phrases and words from several poets and poets, writers from here and elsewhere. Love, tenderness, time, memory, everyday gestures are among his themes and his words. Louise also told me that she finds a certain poetry in everyday expressions that bring people closer to life.
Need we remind you that in Quebec, very few women embraced the career of an artist 50 years ago, and managed to hold on? Louise Robert was faithful to herself to the end, faithful to her studio where she went every day, faithful to her large formats despite her fragility, faithful to her friends.
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