Artist Bio
While pursuing her own career as a painter and photographer, Janine Carreau combined energies with her husband Pierre Gauvreau from the early 1970s until his death in April of this year. Their recent individual and collaborative works will be shown in the Art = Liberation Exhibition.
Janine Carreau’s early works tended to mix media, combining photography and painting. More recently, she has been concentrating more on painterly abstractions, unapologetically bold in colour and gesture, often inspired by an international and multilingual selection of painters, writers, musicians, celebrities. She has been highly inventive in expanding the old Surrealist collaborative technique of “le cadavre exquis” [the exquisite corpse], producing scores of works with Pierre Gauvreau over the past twenty years, some of which are included in the Art = Liberation exhibition.
Artist Statement
Janine Carreau began painting seriously in1973. This was around the time she met Pierre Gauvreau, and she had been concentrating on photography but gradually turned more and more exclusively to non- figurative painting. Shortly after she first began to exhibit, she also began a series of visual journals, first in 1980 and continuing over a period of at least eight years, using a variety of materials and techniques (pastels, acrylic, montages of clippings from magazines or collages of her own photographs, and text, in all sorts of combinations) sometimes producing one small work per evening over an extended period, then combining and mounting the pieces in a large format. Her The Year of the Rat, for example is comprised of daily visual entries from the Chinese year of the rat — February 2, 1984 to February 19, 1985 — 384 days. These diaries aroused considerable attention, both inside and outside Montreal.
The inclusive, allusive impulse of the journals can often be seen in paintings she was doing at the same time, so that in 1982, for example, she had a show at the Galerie Gilles Saint-Pierre in Montreal that included her 1980-81 journal along with a suite of paintings concerning John Lennon. Homages to people like John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Cohen (see works in this exhibition), as well as to the painter Serge Lemoyne, the poet Claude Gauvreau, and Pierre Gauvreau himself, are a staple of her work. She was also responsible for developing new techniques for the old Surrealist game of “cadavre exquis” (exquisite corpse) where several people collaborate on a single work, not seeing what the others are contributing. Along with Pierre Gauvreau (see recent examples in this exhibition), but also with a number of friends of various ages and professions, she produced more than a hundred such works in a kind of artistic potlach that lasted many years and produced a huge variety of astonishing objects.
Like the so-called folk artists she and Pierre so much admired, Janine is willing to take the risk of being over the top, humorous, playful, startling, garish, using unexpected materials such as lustre paints, sparkles, and collages of exotic papers. Her excellent show at Montreal’s Galerie Bernard in 2000 was fittingly titled “Vous me pardonnerez de ne pas m’excuser” (Pardon me for not excusing myself). In recent paintings such as “There’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in” — Leonard Cohen, from 2008, we can see colours she uses often: bright areas of yellows and reds juxtaposed with deep blues and greens, stippled or patterned in spots or lined in contrasting hues. Her works of recent years exude a kind of boundless energy and invention, all the more impressive because they are, in a sense, born of defiance, in spite of increasing difficulties with Pierre’s health and the drain on her own physical and emotional resources.
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