Is art a magic potion? A remedy for our woes? In her not so distant Nathalie Bondil years, the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, which had become a laboratory dedicated to health, advocated curative activities. It could be visited for free, with a medical prescription. Artists Anne Ashton and Lyne Lapointe do not go that far, but their works offer themselves as options, if not salutary, at least heartwarming, especially in these days of pandemic and environmental crisis.
Through majestic paintings and intimate drawings, their current exhibitions summon human, animal or plant figures, of which we could certainly make models of resistance. The works are also in line with the circular economy. For both, the creative process is based on the recycling of materials or the conservation of found objects. Their way of quoting popular culture and scholarly culture finally sounds like a nice counterpoint to this need for novelty so dear to our time.
At the Maison de la culture de Longueuil, the exhibition Orpheum brings together oil paintings by Anne Ashton from the last ten years. In downtown Montreal, the Bellemare and Lambert galleries offer the exhibition Lyne Lapointe: silk with porcupine hair, a set of ink monotypes produced since 2019. In both cases, the works hold both simplicity (compositions, lines) and accumulation (of references, elements).
The theme of nature has been essential with Anne Asthon for nearly forty years and her arrival in Quebec. From his portraits of poisonous flowers to the shark in five panels from his previous exhibition (2015), through his huge downpours, the native San Diego artist has always magnified what lives and moves on the planet.
“There are things that scare me, obviously, but it’s not sharks, it’s not spiders, it’s not skulls, it’s not centipedes. The things that people tend to [à repousser], that’s what I like, ”said the ex-Californian in French in a video from the Cultural Factory. She admits there being fascinated by the mystery of destructive and graceful things at the same time. There is nothing “just dangerous or beautiful”.
“Interdependence” between creatures, elements and humans is at the heart of an exhibition on the tone of eclecticism, hence the title Orpheum, in reference to the variety theater of the XIXe century. Each work is actually the sum of smaller ones. The fragmented parts, an Ashton signature, line up (the charcoals of No Mind are even suspended on a rope) or stand in a circle. If the rounded patterns (moon, egg, sundial) dominate, it is not only them, the shark of 2015 (Tiburon) resurfacing for our happiness.
The eight panels of Jupiter (2018) are a compendium of this work representing a recognizable and yet little literal world. There is a longitudinal plant (titled Lantern), a leaf in the wind (Float), a cloud (Strike)… Each element, both autonomous and dependent on its neighbor, revolves around the center, left empty, as if to invite us to complete the cycle without interrupting it.
Healing role
“In front of all these works, we become aware of the acute way in which Lyne [Lapointe] feels the fragility of the world right on his body (on the edge of his skin). These works incorporate his own resilience and are invested with his belief that art plays a healing role for soul and spirit, ”writes Lesley Johnstone, in the Bellemare and Lambert galleries booklet.
The exhibition Silk with porcupine hair brings together two series, those around a female silhouette and those around the figure of Joseph Beuys (hat, jacket and cane included), so familiar to the history of art. The superimposed shots of the firsts and the scale ratios of the seconds play on similar contrasting effects. It is as much a question of fragility (small and small bodies) as of mental strength.
Protective coat (2020) is the emblematic painting, the most spectacular undoubtedly by the presence of porcupine hairs planted on a body, like an acupuncture treatment. Its meaning is certainly left to interpretation, as everywhere where the subject is covered with different elements (apple heart, shell, skeleton) or placed in front of oversized animals.
“For Lyne, the body is political: it is the place from which she approaches the complexities of the world around her, and its horrors, always with a touch of humor and a deep humanity”, comments Lesley Johnstone, curator. of the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal and curator of the exhibition with artist Stéphane La Rue.
Lyne Lapointe and Anne Ashton, two artists of the same generation – born at the end of the 1950s – do not practice a didactic art. Without being exemplary, their subjects, represented in an indefinite space, have a magnetic force. Meditative even, which Anne Ashton does not hide, she who invites to a meditation session in addition to the exhibition. Ultimately, art can do good.