In July 2023, we lost one of Quebec’s most important painters. Zïlon was gifted with an indomitable creativity that oozed through the pores of his skin, trickled down onto us and provoked in us creative desires almost as strong as he himself felt them.
The term is correct. To provoke, he provoked.
I met him 15 years ago, at an opening. A meeting that we had slowly prepared through brief contacts on emerging social networks. We looked at each other through profiles: I imagine that we felt that we had something to experience together.
It was not just a small adventure. For 14 years, we built a terrible and terribly beautiful relationship in which I learned almost everything I know today about the art world, about life, about perseverance, about audacity and even, a little, about myself. The exhibition that we are presenting this summer on Atateken Street — accompanied by a whole group of friends of which Zïlon was in some way the central figure — is, one could say, the result of this learning. I put into practice an immense amount of knowledge and a little of the strength that he had transmitted to me.
Zïlon, I don’t know where he got this strength, but he knew how to sediment the world he observed into a polymorphous work. Everywhere he went, what surrounded him was reflected inside him as if through a colored magnifying glass to draw crazy images in his mind that he later reprojected to us, as much through his work as through his personality.
Everything in him was a source of creation. I can still hear him, when I was walking with him or when we went to have a bite to eat at a restaurant, recounting all the facts, events or characters that he happened to come across: he transformed everything into scenes from a crazy comic strip! He was constantly inventing a tragicomic world.
He observed and experienced the horror of the world a lot, in fact. But when he mulled it over, this horror, to paint a surrealist portrait of it, the touch of humor behind it was never too difficult to discern. Zïlon had decided to laugh at the world that horrified him rather than vilify it. And I think we have to remember that with conviction.
A notable artist
The landscape of Montreal and Quebec has been marked by Zïlon since the 1980s. Almost everyone remembers the faces he left on the toilet doors of clubs in the days of Limelight, Oxygène, Glass , the Lizard or the Business (in which he created a truly immersive work of art on the scale of the square, in 1989). He will also be remembered as one of the notable artists of the famous live painting sessions at the Foufounes Électriques. It was around this time that most people began to recognize him almost everywhere; his “urban nomad” period.
It thus slowly attracted the attention of galleries, self-run centers and municipal museums. Even if he often said that this “professional” art world was “mafiart” and that it was necessary to “choose the least venomous snake in the pile”, his twenty solo exhibitions over the years show that , even in this professional career with which he did not really have chemistry, he managed to establish himself.
All this without counting the dozens of collaborations he has made with the fashion industry (Ogilvy or Montréal Mode et Design), theater (Lepage), cosmetics (Givenchy, in Paris), cinema (Arcand, Carle , Lauzon) and video games (Ubisoft).
Mastering a multitude of mediums, he was able to establish his mark in such a vast field, as few artists have been able to do. We were lucky to have him.
Most actors and speakers in the art world in Quebec agree to recognize that Zïlon is an important piece of what has happened here in the last 30 or 40 years. That he had a more than marked influence on his generation and the next. That said, we must admit that his work is not recognized for its true value. We will have to make an effort in the future so that institutions better recognize his work. It is a bit (in all humility) the first brick of this new building that we are trying to lay with the exhibition Zilon. Urban legend.
I cannot help but conclude without saying that I also wanted, through this exhibition, to pay tribute to a wonderful friend, who left this world suddenly last summer due to his health becoming fragile. I will miss him. We will all miss him. As Armand Vaillancourt said in his testimony for our exhibition: “We lost a good captain”.
Hello Zilon!