The other day on the subway, a young Inuit man, obviously homeless, approached me while I was reading the bio making-of of my cousin Hélène de Billy, Riopelle and me. He praised the public work to me The Jousting of the great artist, in the heart of the business district of the metropolis. My seat mate loved this fountain-sculpture. Among its 30 bronze figures, “ The tower of life, with its inukshuk landmark, reminded him of his arctic cradle. “It speaks to me,” he grumbled. Riopelle, who has traveled and celebrated the northern territories and their inhabitants, as evidenced by the thematic exhibition of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts in 2020, would have tasted the homage of this uprooted from the eternal ice.
The automatist painter who died in 2002, who had drunk so much, smoked so much, loved so much, feasted so much, driven so many luxury cars, created so much in the middle of a trance, would be the black sheep of our time. Some would like to pay lip service to his centenary. Too “gendered” to be honest. Come on… a giant is something to be respected. With his looks of a man of the woods, his life of adventures, multiple passions, his brilliant international breakthroughs, his return to the country between geese and tides, the leading artist has something of a Jos Montferrand of cyclopean poetry. Its powerful breath invites Quebecers to embrace their culture and their horizons. This half-nomadic, half-fixed titan, indifferent to the nationalist movement, seems to haul his people with a rope of freedom. To follow him in this tribute year is to board a train set off on our own heels.
The disheveled Montrealer, former student of Borduas, co-signer in 1948 of the burning manifesto Global denial, companion in the Parisian post-war period of legendary artists, from André Breton to Alberto Giacometti via Samuel Beckett and Antonin Artaud, left us a colossal work, cataloged by his daughter, Yseult. Also remain the photos of his weathered features with the mane, the solid frame, the plumbness of the dark look.
He has always accompanied our lives through exhibitions, works sown everywhere. Its mosaics, sorts of stained-glass windows of colors propelled, seem to open on the genesis of the world or on the rediscovered nature. One of them, sun dust, dazzles the eye. Another one, North wind, sales record, evokes the tornado in a turbulent forest. The softness of his prints in the colors of autumn capsizes.
At the Musée national des beaux-arts de Québec, on the Plains of Abraham, master temple of his work, we visit him as we would visit a friend. His fresco Tribute to Rosa Luxemburg, dedicated to his former partner the American painter Joan Mitchell, who died in 1992, is a cry echoed by acrylic paint and aerosol cans in graffiti emergencies. This monumental work was able to reconcile some of Riopelle’s nostalgia for abstraction with his figurative vein. The general public, for its part, celebrates its birds of feathers and beaks. But in Montreal, rue Milton, the high mural dedicated to him by Marc Séguin, in a circle and a bird, suffers from a lack of stylistic amplitude. The devil of a man does not allow himself to be embraced so easily.
Last week, I went to see, at Salle Wilfrid-Pelletier at Place des Arts, Symphonic Riopelle, multimedia concert inspired by his work. The wonderfully projected canvases on full screens accompanied the OSM choirs and performers to a musical creation by Serge Fiori and Blair Thomson. The frame offered repetitive and hypnotic sides, which the violins and the percussions did not always manage to pierce. Excerpts from Riopelle’s interviews imposed his magnetism and humor. In certain acts, paintings, sculptures and music were married, elsewhere under muffled echoes. At the end, while the panels of theTribute to Rosa Luxemburg populated by geese in all their states, a sinuous melodic phrase carried me on its wings. But it is through his works that the painter really makes the earth tremble under our feet.
On the picture rails of the Simon Blais gallery, boulevard Saint-Laurent, we admire Riopelle’s engravings (the exhibition ends Friday). And in this journey of lithographs, etchings and other techniques on paper, the artist’s attempts to represent nature as well as to abstract from it are intoned at the top of their voices. He roars or whispers. The ear hears the sound of its colors in Baudelairian correspondences.
I don’t know where Robert Lepage will land on the boards in the spring in his Riopelle Project, but I know he wants to portray the excess and the fury of this eagle which has imprinted its claw on the side of our mountains. Let’s hope he lets it fly as high as we want to go.