The painter Louise Robert died on the night of Sunday to Monday at the Sacré-Coeur hospital. She would turn 81 on December 13.
A self-taught painter – with a degree in pharmacy from the University of Montreal – she has had, since her first major exhibition, entitled scriptures and presented at the Curzi gallery in the fall of 1975, a remarkable artistic journey. She performed solos in several famous places: Jolliet gallery in Quebec then in Montreal, Yajima gallery, Canadian Cultural Center in Paris and Brussels, Graff gallery, Christopher Cutts gallery in Toronto, Christiane Chassay gallery… Her work was much discussed by critics such as René Payant and by the art historian France Gascon, the poet Denise Desautels, the writer Anne-Marie Alonzo, the sociologist Anne Cauquelin. And his creations are as much part of public collections such as those of the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée des beaux-arts de Montréal and the Musée d’art de Joliette as well as private collections. like that of the Cirque du Soleil or that of the National Bank of Canada…
The art world will remember in particular his retrospective entitled Louise Robert. At the end of the wordsheld at the Musée d’art de Joliette and the Center d’exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul in 2003-2004, an event curated by art historian and critic Gilles Daigneault.
In the exhibition catalogue, Mr. Daigneault explained how Louise Robert “is considered an ‘intense, violent, rich’ colorist who affirms and installs color”, but how she also had a gray period, “a moment of grace” at the end of the 1970s and the beginning of the 1980s, which followed a first black period.
In dialogue with the art of haikus
Following the announcement of the death of M.me Robert, the testimonies of esteem have multiplied.
Her gallery owner, Simon Blais, underlines how her “love affair with Louise’s work goes back to this exhibition of which Gilles was the curator. It was love at first sight. I have always appreciated the very sensual side of his work, his works sometimes painted with the fingers, shimmering in the light. I had the chance to represent one of the important artists in the history of art in Quebec. Her work, resolutely abstract, which incorporated words, haikus, which she wrote in a notebook, spoke of friendship and love, giving an important place to the domain of dreams. Her passion for words and language was also reflected in the fact that Louise had surrounded herself with poet and writer friends. »
Mr. Blais adds that he will mount a tribute exhibition to Louise Robert in 2023.
As for Chantal Boulanger, a long-time friend who, among other things, ran a major gallery in Montreal, and who, as general manager of the Center d’exposition de Baie-Saint-Paul, decided to present the Louise Robert retrospective in Charlevoix, she explains: “The originality of Louise’s work resides in the addition of words and phrases that energize the pictorial material, thus multiplying the avenues of reading. The words being sometimes difficult to read, the work shows the passages from presence to absence which encourage the search for meaning, specific to any representation. To formalist preoccupations is added the fascination of language in painting. Gesture, color, textures and words make the canvas a strange territory that reveals curious landscapes. But, with good reason, René Payant had also qualified his works as self-portraits, as inscriptions of oneself. »
Louise Robert is survived by historian, sociologist and art critic Lise Lamarche, her spouse, with whom she shared her life for 44 years.