Even though museums kept their doors open amidst the Omicron wave, some regulars felt less tempted to poke their noses there. Here is cultural life bubbling again, like a sap in winter. Small and big boots walk together on Sherbrooke Street. With stop at 1380.
During spring break, parents in search of activities drag their children to the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts (MMFA) to admire purple hour, the Swiss Nicolas Party exhibition for the whole family. Pure bargain at a time that unduly multiplies the warnings in the artistic field. Too many nudes here, too much blood there! Some veil the chaste face of their offspring in front of paintings deemed offensive. Move on, don’t stop! These children are however entitled to the worst on social media, but what does it matter? Our societies are not short of a contradiction…
In any case, in this exhibition – the first large-scale entirely orchestrated by the new administration after the turmoil we know – there is nothing to quibble about. Flashing green light for young people aged 7 to 77. And maybe more. A true celebration of color, the senses and pop, this harmonic ensemble of canvases, sculptures, murals in pastel and oil. In a forest of threatening but tamed symbols, nature draws from the sources of dreams and poetry. Visions of Douanier Rousseau come back to haunt us, of the forests of Emily Carr too.
May this post-pandemic exhibition come at the right time! Imagined upstream, but presented in the thrilling hours of the 2022 renewal. And if several adults had become a little like children again after so many months under health stress… They are thirsty for elegance, softness, reassuring melodies to catch their breath , want to find the universe of the tale with or without the magic words: “Once upon a time”. We don’t like everything. Some features appear too schematic. Still, the portraits of women with mushrooms or snakes enchant the eye with their unusual quickdraws and their hemmed curves. Insects and frogs scattered here and there make you smile. Large, rather rudimentary sculpted heads, painted frescoes in situ defy the rainbow of their sound pigments as much as saturated, in Baudelairian correspondences. The visitor dives through caves or shells while snorkeling. The mountains are sacred there.
Works from the MMFA’s collections, which are generally very inspiring, placed side by side by the artist alongside his own, take the pictorial journey back to a time when flowers and wild animals felt better preserved than today. Songs interpreted by Pierre Lapointe, personal compositions or classics from here and elsewhere, to listen to on cellphone, ballads along the way, comforting who better. The lament Where Have All the Flowers Gone?by Pete Seeger, resounds in German in the wake of interpretations by Marlene Dietrich.
Don’t rush COVID-19 survivors! Instead, rock them. Here, visitors advance with their noses in the air into an enchanted universe that warms up for a moment. purple hour is red, yellow, green, coral, orange or cobalt blue. Sometimes really purple too. This museum course is good. And even if, muted, on the walls, shells and crustaceans say they are threatened by human waste, they do not display all the colors of the plea, leaving it to the viewer to graft ecological ultimatums as they please. The artist’s many references assure us that the world is still turning, that yesterday has not erased all its traces, that tomorrow will make its bed on pillars that still stand. That the provax and the antivax will soon talk to each other again without throwing names at each other’s heads. That the walls of our cities will no longer be stormed by barbarian hordes drunk with frustration, misunderstanding and pain.
An exhibition sometimes gives the pulse of the day. Proclaiming: I am the aesthetic you need, here, now. I am the elixir that intoxicates enough to cushion this heavy weight on your shoulders, despite the snow or sleet falling outside and the collective bad mood floating alongside them. When The hymn to spring by Félix Leclerc, through the voice of Pierre Lapointe, makes the toads sing freedom and not “libarté”, everyone once again likes to believe in a possible tomorrow.
I have known exhibitions that are more caustic, more corrosive, attacking our ultimate recesses. That of Nicolas Party showed me the need for harmony and serenity that grips the public after a long ordeal. Because it revealed all around the faces of bruised humans who were rinsing their eyes in it to seek a lost burst of light.