The standoff between a defaulting gallery owner and his owner is coming to an end. The approximately 1,000 works located inside the Le HangArt gallery, locked at the beginning of the month by the owner of the building on rue Saint-Paul, will be returned to the artists from this week, we learned. The Press.
“My intention is to ensure that everyone gets their belongings back,” told us the owner of the building, who wished to remain anonymous so as not to be associated with the gallery owner Hervé Garcia. A beginning of resolution for more than 130 artists who entrusted their works to HangArt.
Hervé Garcia, who no longer had access to his gallery since January 2, reached an agreement with his owner on Sunday so that he could coordinate the delivery of the works to the artists, around 80 of whom are now represented by Me Marc Vaillancourt.
Mr. Garcia will have access to the gallery for a period of 30 days, he will then have to vacate the premises, said the owner.
Awful start to the year
We can say that the year started off badly for the visual artists who have been doing business with this gallery established in Old Montreal since last September.
“The HangArt gallery has closed its doors and we are trying to get our paintings back! », wrote Josée St-Amant on her Facebook page on January 9. She had just received an email from gallery owner Hervé Garcia saying that the owner had changed the locks on the building. At the same time, the HangArt gallery in Quebec also closed its doors.
“Even though we are up to date [dans le paiement] of our rents, and that he has rent in advance, he chose this option rather than dialogue,” wrote the gallery owner in this email dated January 2 that The Press consulted.
False, retorts the owner. “Mr. Garcia and his wife Julie Plouffe signed a long-term commercial lease last August to establish their art gallery there,” he explained to The Press. They took advantage of a rent holiday for the first months, but had to make a first deposit last December. »
According to the owner, the 1er January, Hervé Garcia informed him that he would not pay his rent. That’s when he changed the locks on the gallery.
In a second email sent to gallery artists on January 7 – that The Press was also able to consult –, Hervé Garcia explains that he announced his intention to “sell the gallery to a group of investors”, but that the owner “chose to consider us in default and break our lease in order to sell his building”.
The owner said the building has been for sale for three years. As for Mr. Garcia’s intention to “sell his business”, he remembers very well talking about it with him in December. “We would have been delighted if there was a buyer,” he replies, “and we told him so, but nothing happened. If he was serious, he would have done it, there was nothing stopping him, we saw that in a positive light. »
Since then, Hervé Garcia has suggested that he is bankrupt. In an unsigned email sent to the newspaper The duty, The HangArt wrote: “We are a company like so many others that is collapsing in a difficult economic climate. We are in corporate and personal bankruptcy. »
But after checking with the Office of the Superintendent of Bankruptcy – as of last Friday – neither the Le HangArt gallery nor its associates Hervé Garcia and Julie Plouffe appeared in the register of commercial or personal bankruptcies at the time of writing these lines.
The Press tried to contact Mr. Garcia, but both his phone numbers and his work email are now out of service. The owner, who is in contact with him through a new email address, refused to disclose his contact details for confidentiality reasons.
Not the first time
Hervé Garcia is not at his first problems with his owners. According to court documents, in April 2021, he signed a lease for a little over three years with Ata Saati, owner of 233, rue Notre-Dame Ouest, which housed the HangArt gallery until last summer. He finally left the premises after being sued for non-payment of rent.
The owner of the building on rue Saint-Paul regrets the situation experienced by the artists, but he assures that he had no choice. “I am a building owner. If a tenant does not pay their rent or does not respect the conditions of their lease, normally everything inside is seizable. »
Distraught, the artists turned to the Regroupement des artistes en artsvisuals (RAAV), which suggested they find a lawyer. What was done last week with the hiring of Me Marc Vaillancourt.
My first mandate is to coordinate the delivery of the paintings in the gallery. Because they have to provide proof of ownership. My second mandate will be to recover the amounts owed to the artists for the paintings that have been sold; and my third mandate will be to recover the sums that certain artists have invested to obtain shares in the gallery.
Me Marc Vaillancourt
“It will help things move forward,” the building owner told us. My goal is to return the works to the artists so that I can rent the premises to someone else. But it required a legal framework to do it, so that I could act on behalf of the Le HangArt gallery, because the artists have a legal contract with the gallery. Mr. Garcia will be able to start doing that this week by coordinating with Mr.e Vaillancourt. »
An unusual business model
The business model of this art gallery is unusual to say the least. Unlike the majority of art galleries who choose the artists they want to represent and who take a 50% commission on the income from the sale of the works, Le HangArt only claims 30% of the sales income, but requires a lump sum to consign the works.
Josée St-Amant, for example, paid the sum of $1,000 for a year in exchange for five of her paintings. These prices are not the same for everyone. In some cases, $30 per month per painting is required, or $360 per year per work. In other cases, it is less, depending on the artists, but also on their works.
“This model suits me,” says Josée St-Amant, a self-taught artist who began painting once she retired, after having led a career as a computer scientist. “I am not a well-known artist, I have no training and I paint nudes, which are not paintings that sell easily, so I think that this type of gallery gives the chance to all kinds of artists to sell their paintings. »
PHOTO TAKEN FROM JOSÉE ST-AMANT’S FACEBOOK PAGE
The artist Josée St-Amant in her studio on rue de Port-Royal
Around ten artists were also invited to invest in the gallery in order to obtain shares. This is the case of Vanessa Vaillant, who invested $5,000 in exchange for 0.5% of the gallery’s profits in November 2022. Profits which, according to her, were never paid to her.
“I wrote to Mr. Garcia several times, but he never answered me,” she explains. She recovered six of her paintings at HangArt in Quebec last Friday, and is waiting for the outcome of this affair to find the 24 paintings locked in the Montreal gallery.
“What I want to know,” she told us, “is where is the money? Because he did not pay rent, he received monthly and annual sums of money from artists so that they could exhibit their works, but he also received between $1,000 and $10,000 from around ten artists who invested in his gallery in the hope of having a percentage of the profits, not counting the sale of the works, so where is all this money? »
In the meantime, these artists must pay the lawyer who represents them. They came together to share the costs and have just launched a GoFundMe fundraising campaign, in particular to return the works to artists in Toronto and France.