Artists in mid-career—an ungrateful stage that sometimes condemns them to oblivion—Cynthia G. Renard, Nicolas Laverdière and Jean-Pierre Aubé are standing out this summer with exhibitions that showcase their expertise: the painting of one, the tinkering with materials of the others. And their new identity. The former Cynthia Girard now has only an animal name, she who claims to have “become a bat.” Nicolas Laverdière, formerly a member of the defunct BGL collective, and Jean-Pierre Aubé, for their part, now form the (short-lived?) duo Les Oncles de l’artiste.
The forty or so works gathered at the Maison de la Culture Claude-Léveillée do not lie: Cynthia G. Renard is passionate and even in love with bats. She says so and it is reflected in an exhibition where everything is devoted to them, large and small formats, oil, acrylic or watercolor paintings, drawings, a video and also a leporello (accordion book).
“As a committed artist and experimental painter,” she aims to “link imagination and science in order to raise awareness among the viewer about the issues of the destruction of ecosystems through a virulent and contagious inter-species love,” she writes in the introduction.
His exhibition I save the mouse / Become a bat is the result of a long-term work. Cynthia G. Renard has been painting the winged mammal since 2017, she revealed to us in an interview. It was with the money from the Louis-Comtois prize, obtained in 2018, that she set up the project.
The program is certainly clear and dark — the bat, an endangered animal, is a victim of human activities — but it shines. Bright colors, compositions rich in detail, slogan-statements… The tone adopted by the artist is neither morbid nor repulsive, despite the alarming state of the situation. It is even funny. The painting In 2018, GHGs are jubilant (2018-2023) caricatures greenhouse gases as big, hungry blue clouds—eyes wide open, huge noses. Bats are conspicuously absent here, while a butterfly becomes cynical (“ No future yeah ! »).
In a style that has long been hers, Cynthia G. Renard describes universes worthy of tales head-on. Her bestiary is anthropomorphic, her nature eccentric, her characters out of the ordinary. The current project, which looks like a manifesto, is based on apparently true facts. A mosaic of inks (48 pinned papers) lists “all the bats in the world,” or 1,448 species. A series of small statements scattered between the paintings describe, in blue words with white outlines, the reality of this animal, in particular that of the eight varieties specific to Quebec.
Most are threatened (2019-2023), an iconic large-format acrylic, is densely populated, like the lush forest it reproduces. The patterns that Cynthia G. Renard repeats ad nauseam merge with each other, to the point where this entire (pictorial) ecosystem is based on a skillfully balanced cohabitation.
At the limits of “documentary painting”, the artist’s term to describe the exhibited ensemble, the paintings are a hybrid of genres (like the bat, mammal And bird). With astonishment, the oval “portraits” of the eight Quebec species border on abstraction. We recognize them, but we must pay particular attention to them to distinguish their particularities, to appreciate their richness.
Cinema installation
A few metro stops further, at the Maison de la Culture Ahuntsic, the collective Les Oncles de l’artiste appears. For their first appearance under this funny name, Nicolas Laverdière and Jean-Pierre Aubé offer an immersive, kinetic, spectacular and cobbled-together installation, including its sound element—Aubé’s expertise. We also recognize the excess, illusion and playfulness that have made BGL famous.
Titled Spectatorsthe installation consists of a multitude of suspended theater seats. A button activates the work in a series of movements and sound ambiances that are reminiscent of cinema, the art of illusion par excellence. The mirages are multiple, mirror effect here, deceptive materials there, scale games too. The audience, for its part, finds itself at the heart of the action, in an almost reversed role, as the target of the projectors.
In situ project inspired by the dismantling of the performance hall of the cultural center, Spectators pays homage, in a way, to the capacity of wonder of art and its transformative and restorative principles, including for what is rejected. The materials at the base of its construction were collected in the street. And it only takes the gaze of the public to make this illusion a concrete thing.