It is through glass roofs like the one that enlivens the Champ-de-Mars metro station with its colors that the painter Marcelle Ferron (1924-2001) remains present in the collective imagination. These immense works, which can also be seen at Vendôme station, at Sainte-Justine hospital or at the Granby courthouse, for example, have a little-known counterpart, resulting from explorations carried out in the privacy of the workshop. In this year of its centenary of birth, these small objects are arriving on the market.
“She had her oven, she had her books on how glass reacts to heat. She was coming back [de l’atelier] with its glass plates, showed them to us. She liked to invent things,” says Babalou Hamelin, the third of Marcelle Ferron’s daughters in the 1950s, in an interview.
Virtually a hundred years old since January 29, the signatory of Overall refusal is entitled to celebrations that take place all year round in multiple forms, between a traveling conference and a guided tour of its public works in Montreal. And the big tribute exhibition? It takes place, but not in a museum.
The exhibition The century. Paintings, works on paper and fused glass takes place at the Simon Blais gallery, which represented the artist in the last years of his life. Simon Blais today manages the “inventory of the estate”, and the hundred or so works exhibited this time, with some exceptions, come from this rich collection.
Almost all periods are represented there – the oldest examples, two gouaches, date from 1956. Explorations in fused glass, born from scraps recovered by the artist from his own works, are also there. The fusion took place in the unpredictability of a ceramic kiln.
“Our exhibition is not revolutionary,” recognizes Simon Blais, “except for the fused glass part. We are doing development work that has never been done. » It was Babalou Hamelin who informed him, a year and a half ago, of the existence of this corpus of which he only knew a few cases, because they had only been exhibited in the 1970s. Around thirty of pieces, for which a suitable support for each has been manufactured, can be discovered in the last room.
Already host of a Ferron retrospective in 2008, the Simon Blais gallery is doing it again by increasing the number of small formats. Large-scale paintings appear there, including vertical paintings, one of the artist’s signatures, and one of an unusual round format (a tondo) produced in 1998 for a collective exhibition at the Marie-Uguay cultural center. , Tondo Tondi. A publication dealing exclusively with fused glass works completes the promotion efforts. It opens onto the glass “no 0”, magnified on the poster of a retrospective of… 1973.
Linked to artists like Jean Paul Riopelle and Françoise Sullivan, Simon Blais is not to be pitied when it comes to centenarians. However, we feel bitter about the lack of attention towards Marcelle Ferron.
“I wanted to mark the anniversary as few people have done, no institution, except [le Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec] with a small presentation the last week of January and [le Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent] with a hanging of five paintings. As representative of the estate, my role is to promote it and make people understand that the artist created intelligent, significant and beautiful works at all times of his life,” he explains.
“It’s disappointing, but that’s how it is,” he continues. Museums have their reasons. [Marcelle Ferron] was not a priority. Does that send a message that she’s not important enough in the story? Perhaps, but we can add the names of Jacques Hurtubise and Jean McEwen. There is no one who thought of doing a big McEwen exhibition [centenaire en 2023], even though it is one of the biggest. »
The retrospective of Marcelle Ferron’s lifetime, however, took place at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Montreal, a year before her death. The major sections of his work were there. But not everything had been said, notes Simon Blais.
Babalou Hamelin is not worried, because her mother’s memory, she believes, is ensured by her public works. “It can’t be erased. That’s what’s beautiful about public art. It doesn’t belong to one person. And it was important for Marcelle to allow people to see color, to live in color,” says the most artistic of the three sisters — she is an editor of fiction films and documentaries.
“I loved my mother. A passionate one. She said that painting was a fatal love. It’s not a bad thing to be the child of an artist,” emphasizes Babalou Hamelin.