Serge Lemoyne died of cancer on July 12, 1998 at the age of 57. So it’s been 23 years since this artist disappeared. And it has been 33 years since Lemoyne had a major exhibition in a museum across the country, and still! This old retrospective, which was presented at the Musée du Québec – from November 3, 1988 to January 19, 1989 – was then of a rather limited format… We will hardly be surprised by such a thing. Our museums do not present much the artists referred to with contempt as “local”, even when they have had, like Lemoyne, national legitimization and even outside the country.
Those who live here do not always have the recognition of our institutions. Our museums prefer to present the “international” stars of the moment. And we will hear in this word “international” all the pirouette, the lie that it embodies since it is a question of designating artists recognized by the art market and art galleries in the West.
But back to Lemoyne. Curator Eve-Lyne Beaudry had the brilliant idea of devoting to this multidisciplinary, unclassifiable, often disturbing artist a retrospective worthy of the name, which allows him to come out of a certain oblivion and even a certain contempt. We will remember, for example, how, in 2011, Loto-Québec – a government corporation – decided to remove from the walls of one of its casinos, in a rather cavalier manner, a work commissioned from the artist… This work is still inaccessible to the public to this day [voir encadré].
Lemoyne nevertheless created an art that has rightly marked the history of art in Quebec and Canada. And his work is not limited to the cycle Blue White Red created in tribute to the hockey players of the Canadiens, series produced between 1969 and 1979 and which is shown a little more often. She also opens this exhibition, not chronological, with the aim of perhaps reaching out to a wider audience. Not far from the painting Lemoyne dedicated to him, we even exhibited the protective mask of goalkeeper Ken Dryden. Lemoyne might have liked such a staging …
Nevertheless, this exhibition brilliantly highlights Serge Lemoyne’s contribution to modern art in the country. An artist who upset the Quebec artistic scene of the 1960s and 1970s, still marked by Global refusal and abstraction, by making happenings and other multidisciplinary events. It will start with Week A from April 20 to 26, 1964. And this will continue with works that are always innovative and unclassifiable. In 1968, the critic Yves Robillard, in Press, for want of a word that could contain the creativity of Lemoyne and his friends, qualified their events as “political-cultural activities”…
Thereafter, Lemoyne will also carry out paintings with fluorescent pigments to be seen in the dark. In this regard, let us underline how Beaudry and the museum team judiciously set up this series entitled Cosmos (1965-1966) by showing, which had never been done, these works with ultraviolet lighting. An event that may never happen again, the works being fragile to this type of light.
We will also note elements of a major conceptual work entitled Of the sad fate reserved for originals, work-event, whose title is in itself a strong social position. This work could also have given rise to a reconstruction of the presentation room of the time … Such a recreation could one day be the project of a single exhibition or a museum. And we will admire the presentation of the series of Tributes to living artists (1987) which honored Françoise Sullivan, Pierre Gauvreau… Lemoyne had the intelligence to recognize artistic merits in others and he was already underlining how we find it difficult to celebrate our artists.
You absolutely have to go and see this fabulous exhibition which allows you to see a major artist in our art history and a very rich part of our collective history.
Lemoyne forgotten in crates?