The essential of Quebec art that is Claude Tousignant, in his nineties since December 2022, has been painting for more than six decades. At the Art mature gallery, the exhibition Recent paintings and other wonders includes works from the workshop he still frequents daily. And its unalterable process – drawing with pencil, applying masking tape, coloring with acrylic, removing the tape… – always hits the mark.
But what do Françoise Sullivan, Armand Vaillancourt and Gabor Szilasi do to stay creative at an advanced age? At Tousignant, the marvel, to use the term from the title of the exhibition, still operates. The bold colors rub together closely and give an impression of vibration and movement. The pictorial plane seems to undulate. The formats remain imposing.
For his fifth individual exhibition at Art mature – the first in seven years – the author of the famous targets of the 1960s (the “chromatic accelerators”) is offering diamonds. This form is not new to him or to his fellow visual artists (Molinari, Goguen, Gaucher, etc.), but it remains a curiosity. Here, in group shooting, the diamond exceeds the eccentricity.
Produced between 2019 and 2023, the eight works are presented in large isolated panels or diptychs. The color associations vary from one painting to another, as do the number and width of the bands. The eye that looks at them, like the targets of yesteryear, is attracted by the heart of the painting, out of the need to fix a point.
Beyond the inevitable optical experience it offers, Tousignant’s painting is valuable for the meticulous studio work on which it depends. Wonders do not come from a well-oiled machine, nor from a somewhat artificial intelligence. The exhibition reminds us of this, or demonstrates it, in two ways.
It first includes old works, with a gestural aesthetic, which precede the hard edge with which the artist is associated. These watercolors produced between 1955 and 1958 announce future explorations in color of the space of the painting. The most geometric of them shows a red diamond which stands out from a larger vertical band. A sort of premonition which is finally coming to fruition with the current exhibition.
The gallery owners also had the good idea of concluding the tour with the short documentary Claude Tousignant. One last painting (2022), by Zoë Tousignant, the artist’s daughter. Filmed entirely in the workshop, the film shows in contemplative shots both the man at work and a host of details of his daily life. The complicity is palpable between the director and her father, particularly in the few sequences where she asks him questions. Without trying to deny his taciturn personality, she manages to make him say something – “I paint too much, I fill the spaces. I should stop. »
Returns to the past
Although Recent paintings and other wonders takes an eye on the present, talking about Claude Tousignant means approaching the past. It’s inevitable. His painting can also be seen, moreover, at the Molinari Foundation, which looks back on The Responsive Eyehistorical exhibition of 1965. But there is not only one for Tousignant at the moment.
In Zoë Tousignant’s documentary, the master of abstraction evokes moments spent drinking scotch with friends, “especially Hurtubise”. Gestural artist, known for his symmetrical compositions, Jacques Hurtubise (1939-2014) reappears this fall for the opening of his workshop in Terrebonne, renamed for the occasion “Ephemeral cultural center”.
The opportunity is too rare not to highlight it: sixty years of painting recounted where the paintings were born. This is not a self-guided exhibition, but a guided tour, under the care of an artist, a student at UQAM. The experience exudes authenticity, without fluff and above all in a straightforward manner – the commented tables are not always well placed.
The guide’s words, fair and clear, present both the character and his work. The route, fragmented like his painting – Hurtubise has never stopped reinventing himself – comes and goes between the two rooms of this space redeveloped when the artist left to live in Halifax in the 1990s. Each era represented allows us to understand that, regardless of whether Hurtubise appealed to the hard edgeor grid composition, he played with appearances, simulating the spontaneity of the gesture or the repetition of a motif.
Represented by the Simon Blais gallery, Jacques Hurtubise will be entitled to his proper exhibition in November, one year before the tenth anniversary of his death. For the moment, the gallery is paying tribute to another painter, Jean McEwen (1923-1999), on the occasion of his centenary of birth.
The manner is similar – twenty-six paintings from all periods – and highlights McEwen’s almost hazy touch. His own explorations, sensory more than optical, are expressed in a variety of pictorial codes, from the grid to the painting within the painting, including (almost) monochromy. The renowned colorist had an eye for balanced, multi-plane compositions and could also simulate symmetry — The verdigris kid #2 (1997).
McEwen, Tousignant, Hurtubise: three painters from successive generations to whom it is always good to turn.