Link to Obituary Statement by Ray Ellenwood
link to Montreal Gazette Article on Pierre Gauvreau
link to The Globe and Mail Article on Pierre Gauvreau
Artist Bio
Pierre Gauvreau was born in Montréal on the 23 August 1922. In 1941, while a student at Montréal’s École des beaux-arts, Pierre discovered French modernism through magazines. This discovery influenced his work and attracted the attention of Paul-Émile Borduas who invited Gauvreau to join the radical young artists and intellectuals who met informally in Borduas’s studio. Like them, Gauvreau and his poet brother, Claude, became interested in the surrealist idea of automatism as a way of releasing creativity.
As an early disciple of Borduas who gave him the nickname “born painter,” Gauvreau was a signatory of the famous manifesto, Refus global, published in 1948 by the Automatists led by Borduas. Gauvreau was represented in 1951, along with Jean-Paul Riopelle, in a series of exhibitions held in Berlin, Lille, and Brussels by the Surrealist-affiliated group, Rixes.
By the mid-1950s, Gauvreau was using looser, more gestural imagery in his work, and was also working for the new medium of TV as a writer, director and producer. He stopped painting in the early 1960s and did not start again until 1975.
In 1977, after a hiatus of more than ten years during which his energies were absorbed by film and television, Gauvreau’s colours intensified, his canvases grew larger, and he began working in a style that combined his earlier gestural brushwork with shapes and techniques associated usually with colour field and hard-edged painting: large areas of bright colour, geometric shapes, and the use of tape and collage to give sharply designated edges.
In 1995 Gauvreau suffered through a multiple bypass operation that looked as though it might end his career (if not his life). Within a few months he was painting again but his strength and stamina were such that large works with pigment applied by brush or knife proved too challenging. As his friend Jean- Paul Riopelle, had done, Gauvreau turned to mixed media and the extensive use of acrylic sprayed over various stencils including lace doilies given to him by a friend some years ago to produce a series of works of astonishing variety, complexity, and depth.
Gauverau’s most recent work continues his exploration of gesture and calligraphy.
Artist Statement: Pierre Gauvreau
Note to the Reader: Despite recent health issues, Pierre Gauvreau remains committed to the exhibition: ART = LIBÈRATION. We are fortunate in that Pierre has two advocates who, if necessary, are able to act on his behalf: his wife, Janine Carreau and Ray Ellenwood, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar at York University in Toronto. Professor Ellenwood is an award-winning translator and author of several books including Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement and Total Refusal / Refus Global: The Manifesto of the Montreal Automatists.
In an email Ellenwood offers the following in lieu of a formal artist’s statement:
Since 1995, when he had a major bypass operation, Pierre Gauvreau’s health has been precarious and his artwork has been an answer to, and refuge from, almost constant distress. The quantity and quality of paintings he had produced during the past months left me and Gille Lapointe speechless when we visited him last July (2010). There is a kind of youthfulness and vitality in his work that completely belies the conditions under which it was made.
A statement made to a Montreal journalist emphasizes the spontaneity of Pierre Gauvreau’s approach — “even the materials I use are picked ad hoc, as I am proceeding with the picture. These materials are the tools of the unconscious” (Tancred Marsil as translated by Janos and Linds Szanyi). Over the years, he has maintained that quality in his work, through various changes in style. He never worked exclusively with a pallet knife, as some of his friends did; in the 1980s he adapted the tools of colour field and hard edge painting, but always in playful tension with gestural brush strokes. In a 1979 interview he spoke about learning a lot from folk artists he discovered while producing a television series, saying “They gave me a kind of aesthetic permission, an audacity I might not have had in my use of colour and also form, the forms we label beautiful or ugly, ancient or contemporary. I don’t worry about those things any more. I don’t think I used to, intellectually, but we develop conditioned responses to our own work.” It’s in this spirit that Gauvreau uses a large collection of doilies given to him by a friend some years ago, along with acrylic paint sprayed for a stencil effect, to produce a series of works of astonishing variety, complexity and depth.
The spirit of the “patenteux”, the spontaneous folk artists he admires, also informs the large series of exquisite corpses (works in the Surrealist tradition, to which two or more artists contribute without knowing what the others have done) that Gauvreau has created along with a veritable host of family members, friends, and colleagues from many disciplines, but especially with his wife, Janine Carreau. In the past ten years, these have become a major part of his work, almost a genre in themselves, with new techniques and materials developed by Carreau, who is an excellent photographer and painter with her own career.
Ray Ellenwood, November 16th, 2010
Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.