An artist’s studio will always have a layer of mystery. Even for an experienced art historian like Laurier Lacroix. For the exhibition he designed for the Musée d’art de Joliette (MAJ), he did not seek to elucidate a “phenomenon of transmutation, [qui fait] that a piece of wood becomes a work of art”, a mission suitable, he says, to other professionals. By bringing together 70 works, mainly paintings and photographs, he focuses instead on the types of studio and the functions it can take on. Artists don’t just turn wood into art.
“I wanted to make a history of the art of Quebec never written”, says the professor emeritus of UQAM, met in a Montreal café in the last days of 2022. He will write a book of it with the outcome still unknown. The exhibition The workshop as creation. Stories of artists’ studios in Quebec is only a step aside from this vast project. “A small parallel iceberg”, suggests Laurier Lacroix to illustrate the scope of a subject spanning two centuries.
“There are several activities that surround the act of creating,” he continues. The workshop is where it all happens. What interests me are the peripheral functions, which have to do with the accumulation, the collection of materials, the transmission. The presence of assistants. The exhibition for friends. Open workshops. The administration of a career. I document all of this through history. »
At MAJ, the workshop will be the subject of works, represented in a thousand ways, and even more. Over the years, “the studio becomes a work”, specifies the winner of a Prix du Québec (in 2008), and it becomes difficult to dissociate one from the other. This is the case with Irene F. Whittome (series Room 9011980-1982) or with Massimo Guerrera (Darboral2000-2005).
A specialist in historical painting (notably of Ozias Leduc and Suzor-Coté), Laurier Lacroix was well placed to find emblematic examples from the end of the 19the century. Self-portrait in the studio (circa 1849), by Théophile Hamel, is one of them: [Hamel] claims something through this representation of the artist painting himself. »
What brings the eras together is “the mobility of artists and the difficulty of finding a studio”. The issue is not specific to the XXIe century. “It seems that there have always been more artists than places to receive them,” says the independent curator. But there will always be artists. And their legendary resourcefulness is evident in the type of workshops that Laurier Lacroix offers, ranging from the kitchen table to places specially designed for creation. To be seen in February.