The first time Manon Barbeau saw the St. Lawrence River was in Saint-Fabien-sur-Mer. It was during a rare trip she had made with her father, the automatist painter Marcel Barbeau, signatory of Global refusal. “I did not live with my father, says the filmmaker. But the first and only time I had a vacation with my dad in my life was when I was 12. He had invited me to Saint-Fabien. There I saw the river for the first time in my life. In all its power, with spurting water. […] It amazed me. »
Decades later, it was still towards Saint-Fabien-sur-Mer that Manon Barbeau and her daughter, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette, turned to give the final touches to the exhibition project. Views of the river, organized by Bibliothèque et Archives Nationales du Québec (BAnQ), in collaboration with Loto-Québec. The two women chose the river as the theme for this exhibition, and selected 36 prints from the collection of some 1,000 pieces that the two institutions had in common.
People talk about our attachment and our love for the river, but often it stops there because we don’t know the river. It’s quite tragic that Montreal is an island and that we are proud of the St. Lawrence River without knowing it.
Then, they built a mother-daughter dialogue around these works, and also around the river, which is also the theme of the latest book by Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette,Women riverpublished by Marchand de Feuilles.
Politics and poetics
For the author, this speech is also political, in the sense that it draws attention to the fragile condition of the threatened river, in particular by the loss of oxygen. “People talk about our attachment and our love for the river, but often it stops there because we don’t know the river,” she says. It’s quite tragic, that Montreal is an island, and that we are proud of the St. Lawrence River without knowing it. By working on river womanI met scientists from UQAR [Université du Québec à Rimouski], who told me about the life of the river in its details, its algae forests and its tragedy. It loses its oxygen. In the context of her conversation with her mother, Anaïs writes: “The river is choking. This tragedy has a pretty name. Hypoxia. »
But the St. Lawrence is not lost, she specifies, provided that we take a very serious interest in its destiny.
To save the world, you have to know it and marvel at it, believe the two women. His mother, Manon, for her part, tells how winkles graze on algae, or how you can see, at the bottom of the water, the heart of a transparent sea butterfly beating. She names “crepidules that change sex from time to time; the false Venus, the sea pen, Aristotle’s lantern and the amethyst gem which bears the name of a jewel”.
“This river, she says to her daughter, I love it, but I don’t really know it. And as you fear that without stories, the world will disappear, I am going to try to name it for you, name what inhabits its rolls, its undertows, its swells, its breaking waves and its scoundrels. »
These dialogues between Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette and her mother were recorded. We can therefore listen to them while looking at the prints that inspired them, or even read them on panels deployed on site.
The whole forms the exhibition Views of the river, inaugurated earlier this week at the Grande Bibliothèque, rue Berri, in Montreal. On the first two floors of the library, you can therefore enjoy the collection of selected works. The exhibition opens with the print River, by Kittie Bruneau, who herself had a home-workshop on Île Bonaventure for a long time. In the accompanying dialogue, Anaïs Barbeau-Lavalette refers to a painting, painted by her grandfather, which he had titled Little Anais.
“He painted it in front of the river while I was playing in my pebbles,” she says. This canvas, she learned of its existence at a Book Fair. “I was there and there was a lady who said to me, ‘I bought this painting from your grandfather.’ »
arts and science
Marcel Barbeau had a studio for a long time on the other side of the river, in Saint-Irénée, in the Charlevoix region. And it is in front of this river that he developed a characteristic blue, like the one found on the serigraphy The border vaultswhich closes the exhibition.
“That blue is the blue of the Saint-Irénée sky,” says Manon Barbeau. For his daughter Anaïs, art and science must resume an interrupted dialogue. And she quotes Darwin, who was inspired by the Color schedule of Werner to describe the sea, “indigo with a bit of azure blue”, under a “Berlin blue” sky.
The 36 works collected have not all been drawn with the St. Lawrence River in mind. It was Anaïs and Manon who saw there sometimes bathers, sometimes seaweed or fish. There scroll the print Five fowlersby Roland Giguere, Autumn Chronicle noh 1by Marc Séguin, or even The lake of signsby Bonnie Baxter, and The ancient machineby René Derouin.
Library and National Archives of Quebec takes this opportunity to celebrate the 30e anniversary of the legal deposit of prints, as of all printed works of art. BAnQ’s collection includes some 30,000 prints signed by 1,500 artists. These numbered works often have a limited edition. About 1,000 prints by Quebec artists are part of both the BAnQ collection and that of Loto-Québec. This is where the two curators drew the works presented in the exhibition.
If Manon and Anaïs Barbeau lived far from Marcel Barbeau, and they both say they have little experience as curators in the field of visual art, we feel on this exhibition the painter’s gaze, very close, like a guide.