America’s rise to super power status after the end of World War II allowed it to broadcast its revolutionary ideas. Its artists were recognized as the center of modern art for a modern world.
The fight against fascism and communism heralded in the abstract expressionist era, which celebrated individuality, freedom and personal experience. The very act of applying paint was pushed to its limits, from new physical application techniques to innovative minimalist colour expressions.

Suddenly, the use of art to depict something became irrelevant and the formal and physical qualities of the art – colours, materiality, scale – became the subject. Paintings stopped representing portraits, landscapes, or objects and explored its own qualities.

There Is No Message visits the themes of abstract expressionism, from minimalist colour fields to fast-motion splatters of paint. Modern perspectives such as colour choices and renewed ideas of composition are applied by Vancouver artists who maintain the pure absence of depiction.

Artist’s Statement

The world leaks. We drip, ooze, and heave on a planet that belches smoke and fire. As a species we are determined to sanitize and contain our bodies and everything we contact. Ironically, while science dangles the promise of absolute control and perfection, the more we discover the less we can be sure of. Even a straight line becomes more illusory as new technologies reveal greater fissures along its continuum. My art addresses the cracks in the facade, the mess, those straggling ethereal bits of dreams, wind, joy, and rage that cannot be explained or contained.

Enda has studied at Vancouver Art School and completed studio courses and workshops with prominent Canadian artists such as Toni Onley and Joan Balzar, both of whom she considers her mentors.

While maintaining an active art practice, Enda’s inquisitiveness has taken her through stimulating creative careers. She has worked as a costume designer, fabric artist and founded Enda B. Fashion Limited.

Since her first gallery shows in 1969, Enda has exhibited her work in many group and solo exhibitions. Two of her early abstract paintings were included in the Estonian Art in Exile exhibition at KUMU National Art Museum of Estonia in Tallinn in 2010. Her works have been also selected by the curators to be included in the museum’s permanent historical collection.

ARTIST STATEMENT

What I deeply enjoy is experimenting with the simple elements of colour and line to create a composition of dynamic optical impact.

ARTIST STATEMENT

In the short story, Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote (1939), by Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, the character Menard rewrites Cervantes’ Don Quixote word for word.  In the story, Menard’s reproduction of the Quixote is heralded as equally textured and rich in subtlety as the original, due to the innumerable changes and frames of reference in the world since the original Quixote was written.

Some have questioned why I am painting in a mode that references that of mid-20th century painting, specifically that of colour field artists. The best answer I have to that question is that the artists at work during the rapidly evolving stages of modernism couldn’t have had time to find all the answers to paint in that method.

Creating large-scale abstract paintings, my current work is an investigation of pure abstraction and the phenomenological properties generated by complex colour and simple form. To this end, my process is very intuitive and physical, possessing a strong relationship to the body.

Every layer of colour and form in the works is informed by my observations and research about the socio-cultural conditions of life, specifically those within Vancouver. These specific situations, however, I prefer to leave unspoken, and it’s here that I rely on the viewer to understand the works in an intuitive and embodied way.

Playing with the Exquisite Corpse is an exhibition featuring work by local Vancouver 2D media artists who participated in a blind collaboration facilitated by Baron Gallery on November 20, 2011. Using the premise of Dr Ray Ellenwood’s talk about the use of the Exquisite Corpse method in some of the paintings featured in Art = Liberation, the artists then paired up to produce one half of a collaborative piece separate from each other. On Sunday 27th November, the halves will be reassembled and the final composite pieces exhibited.

Art= Libération features 47 works by Automatist, Pierre Gauvreau and painter/photographer, Janine Carreau , curated by Dr. Ray Ellenwood, author of “Egregore: A History of the Montréal Automatist Movement”, and “The Automatiste Revolution”. A substantial number of paintings in the exhibition were created using the Exquisite Corpse method based on the Surrealist game of chance and uncensored artistic collaboration. In these works the two artists would work on either one canvas or a section of board without ever seeing the other’s contribution, until the final unveiling/compositing of the piece.

Playing with the Exquisite Corpse
features work by the following artists:
Jane Venter
Owen Ellis
Sydney Gregoire
Frederica Panon
Jennifer Mawby
Oker Chen
Farai Gwavava
Cindy Wu
Shane Hughes
Sharon Burns
Susanna Blunt

Opening event: November 27th 2pm – 4pm
Runs: November 27th – December 3rd

Featured Pieces

Exhibition Opening Event

It begins in the mid-seventies and goes on until April 7, 2011, this life in rainbow hues.  There were dark moments, especially during the later years, but in general it was a life full of shared energy, creativity, love in all its chromatic possibilities.

It moves essentially between the apartment on rue Cherrier in Montreal and the small country house in the Eastern Townships.  Not much travel elsewhere.  Life crammed with activity.  Montreal essentially the place for business, showing, meeting people;  Pigeon Hill for painting, writing, gardening. There, the saturated colours of acrylic paint echo masses of flowers (including a connaisseur’s collection of  Iris).  Twenty years of good health, physical work, an enormous amount of writing for television by Pierre, followed by another fifteen when, in spite of failing health, he continued to work, concentrating more and more on painting, the antidote to his ills.

Pierre had returned to painting after their relationship began (following a “coffee break” of  several years devoted entirely to film and television) with a rush of energy, producing truly large-scale works for the first time:  Les fenêtres de Pénélope (Penelope’s Windows, 1978), for example, a work on canvas roughly six by fifteen feet;  or the hinged, folding screen made of four plywood panels, 8 x 16 feet, brightly painted, cut and collaged on both sides, entitled Paravent (Windscreen).  Janine had been working mostly in photography and film when she met him, but she too returned to painting with renewed energy after they got together, often mixing media, including photographs, collaged illustrations, text, combined with acrylic painting.  Eventually, the paint took over.  As Pierre turned to working with stencil effects and sprayed colours in the late 90s, Janine’s acrylics became increasingly bold and textured.  Both pushed the boundaries of “good taste” using collaged glossy papers, sparkles, and gaudy colours, like the “patenteux”, the Québec folk artists they so admired.

In 1994 began an impressive series of collaborative works, stimulated by the well-known film-maker and self-taught artist, Charles Binamé. These were variations on the Surrealist game of cadavre exquis (exquisite corpse), where different players provide parts of a sentence or a drawing without seeing what others have contributed.  From drawings to paintings to large, three-dimensional works in various media, these exquisite corpses grew and grew, involving family and friends of all ages and all walks of life, while Janine Carreau developed a system that seems to have truly revolutionized the game.  Quantities of these works have been shown in the ensuing years, notably at an exhibition of over 150 pieces entitled Célébrer la vie (To Celebrate Life), organized by Janine, held during an international conference on heart disease in collaboration with the cardiologist who had, only a few months earlier, seen Pierre through a bypass operation with life-threatening complications. Pierre contributed to Célébrer la vie and would continue to produce an astonishing quantity and variety of work in the following years, despite bleak medical prognoses and set-backs.

            Being Pierre Gauvreau’s official agent, Janine Carreau has worked to show and promote his creations as well as producing and exhibiting her own.  Over the years they had many separate, but also several important joint exhibitions.  There was one, for example, in Rivière-du-loup at the Galerie le Goéland in 1995;  another at the International Festival of Poetry in Trois-Rivières in 1996;  another in Frelighsburg, Québec, in 2002;  and finally the very important “Echos d’un autre monde / Echos of Another World” at the Galerie Michel-Ange in Montréal in 2009, for which Janine produced an ambitious, richly illustrated, bilingual catalogue.

            In Janine’s work, from the photographic journals to the most recent abstracts, there is often a note of commemoration, of celebrating events and people such as John Lennon, Marilyn Monroe, Leonard Cohen.  Pierre too celebrated historical moments and those he called “Les insoumis” (the unsubdued).  But I am especially fond of his gentle series, Les riches heures de la rue Cherrier (The Rich Hours of Cherrier Street).  The title evokes, of course, life on the street where he lived, but also the famous fifteenth-century illustrated manuscript, Les très riches heures du Duc de Berry.  There’s a certain irony because (as another one of his titles states) Pierre had trouble kneeling, whereas the good Duke’s book was a celebration of saints and a call to prayer.  Besides, Pierre and Janine’s house on rue Cherrier was never quite as rich as a Duke’s castle.  Nonetheless, there certainly was and is a particular richness there, an atmosphere suffused with keen intelligence and bright colour.   

Ray Ellenwood will be curating the Art = Liberation Exhibition running September 28 – Spring 2012 at the Baron Gallery.

Link to Life in Bright Colours: Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau written by Ray Ellenwood.

Obituary Article for Pierre Gauvreau by Ray Ellenwood

PIERRE GAUVREAU, A MAJOR FIGURE OF QUEBEC MODERNISM
“For Pierre Gauvreau, the role of painting is to express, confront, provoke, and advance thought.”

-Jeanette Biondi

Just weeks ago his recent paintings hung in the Michel-Ange Gallery in Montreal, alongside works by his old friends Marcel Barbeau and Fernand Leduc. He was there for the launch on February 17th, and again on the 20th, against his doctor’s wishes because he’d had a leg amputated in October and his whole circulatory system was bad. But he sat in his wheelchair for almost two hours each time, basking in the show, joking about feeling like a sports star with all the sudden attention. He was actually able to do some painting in his studio as late as March. This was a man who’d had a major bypass operation complicated by a stroke in 1995, who found relief from almost constant pain by creating bright, youthful, vibrant canvases, even after he’d given up writing scripts for television.

Pierre Gauvreau was born in Montreal in 1922 and lived there all his life except for a brief time in the England with the armed forces in 1945-46. Beginning in 1941, he was part of a circle of young artists from various disciplines who gravitated around the painter, Paul-Émile Borduas. They were dubbed “The Automatists” by newspaper reporters in the months before the publication of their manifesto, Refus global (1948), a document widely recognized as a crucial expression of Quebec modernism and of the unrest that would eventually lead to the so-called quiet revolution. Pierre Gauvreau was very active in the production of the manifesto and eventually in defending it publicly against attacks by the clergy and newspaper columnists. In her biography, Jeanette Biondi calls him the angry young man, no doubt because of his life-long combat, in all the media he could muster, against what one commentator called “liberticidal ideologues” in the worlds of politics, religion, education, and the arts.

After his marriage to a fellow signatory of Refus global, Madeleine Arbour, in 1949, and knowing he would have difficulty surviving as a painter of abstract, avant-garde works, Pierre entered the world of public broadcasting as an announcer with the radio station CHLP, which led to other jobs in radio and
eventually to television in its early stages with both Radio-Canada and Radio-Québec. Soon after the birth of their first child, Madeleine Arbour also began a highly successful career in children’s television before concentrating on design. Pierre had a short stint with the National Film Board but then returned to television as a freelancer. By the mid-fifties, he was showing his paintings energetically at every opportunity in Montreal, as well as writing articles on art for the Journal Musical Canadien, while pursuing his career in television. Meanwhile, other painters of the Automatist group, such as Jean-Paul Riopelle, Fernand Leduc, Marcel Barbeau, Marcelle Ferron and Borduas had left, or were preparing to leave, for Paris or New York.

As a director and producer in television, Pierre Gauvreau was involved with shows that are classics in the history of the medium in his home province, such as Pépinot et Capucine, the puppet show that a generation of children grew up on, and the epic historical series Radisson and D’Iberville. There were documentaries on the women of rural Quebec, and a thirty-part series on folk artists of the province (which had a liberating impact on his own painting and led to a fabulous collection of work by “spontaneous” artists adorning every corner of his house and garden), but he is best known for having written the scripts of three very popular television serials: Le Temps d’une paix (1979-1986), Cormoran (1991-1993), and Le Volcan tranquille (1997-1998). Although Gauvreau was never a nationalist in the conservative tradition, he early realized the importance of the electronic media for the preservation of the language and culture of Québec, and his commitment to the popular media was a counterweight and complement to the formal abstraction of his painting. It’s no accident that his television trilogy covers Quebec history leading up to and following Refus global, with the same issues of oppression, fear, and liberation. Le temps d’une paix was especially popular, running to 135 episodes, and is still being broadcast.

At the height of his involvement in electronic media, Gauvreau’s painting slowed and eventually stopped for a time, and he often lamented the fact that friends who knew of his work in one medium knew nothing of the other. But he was committed to painting for over seventy years, and it was his main obsession at the end of his life. Like many painters of his generation, he began showing his work in his apartment, or in cafés, bookstores or school auditoriums before graduating to galleries at home and abroad. He was represented in major group shows, locally and internationally, starting in the mid-forties. His work was present at the historic exhibition of Canadian painting in Spoleto in 1962, and again a few weeks later in an exclusively Automatist show in Rome. There was also the “Borduas et les automatistes” exhibitions in Paris and Montreal in 1971-72 and, most recently, the “Automatiste Revolution” exhibition at Ontario’s Varley Gallery and New York’s Albright-Knox Gallery in 2009-10.

Over the years, Gauvreau had individual showings in numerous galleries in Victoria, Toronto, Kingston, and across the province of Quebec. But surprisingly, except for solo exhibitions at the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal in 1979, and at the Musée du Québec in 1981, the large public galleries seemed reluctant to offer him a major retrospective. One wonders if this had to do with his second career, or the fact that he was always slightly out of tune with his friends and fellow-painters, not so quick to move into all-over abstraction, never entirely giving up his brush for a pallet knife or a roller, often humorously juxtaposing the conventions of gestural, colour field and hard edge painting while never committing to one style. The carnivalesque use of colour and materials in his late paintings may give conservative curators pause, but it seems to appeal strongly to young viewers.

From 1960 to 1975, during the height of his work in film and television, Gauvreau lived with Monique Lepage, a stage and screen actress and theatre director. Together, they bought a country property in Abercorn that allowed him to show his talents as a carpenter. This setting in the Eastern Townships
played a large part in the photographic and film documentaries of his life and no doubt had an effect on his artwork. In 1976, he began a relationship with his third wife, Janine Carreau (painter/photographer and companion to the end) with whom he eventually developed another country property where they indulged in a common great obsession: gardening. It was in these years that he returned to painting with a rush of energy, producing truly large-scale works for the first time, including, for example, a folding screen made of four, 4!8 plywood panels, brightly painted, cut and collaged on both sides.

As Gauvreau’s agent, Janine Carreau worked to promote his work as well as producing and exhibiting her own. They often showed together and, in 1994, began an impressive series of collaborative works, stimulated by the well-known film-maker and self-taught artist, Charles Binamé. These were variations on the Surrealist game of cadavre exquis, where different players provide parts of a sentence or a drawing without seeing what others have contributed. From drawings to paintings to large, three-dimensional works in various media, these exquisite corpses grew and grew, involving family and friends of all ages and all walks of life, while Janine Carreau developed a system that seems to have truly revolutionized the game. Quantities of these works have been shown in the ensuing years, notably at an exhibition of over 150 collaborative pieces entitled “Célébrer la vie”, organized by Carreau, held during an international conference on heart disease not long after Gauvreau had his bypass. Since then, there have been a number of joint exhibitions, mostly of Gauvreau and Carreau but also of Gauvreau and his daughter Annick.

Plans were afoot to have a major exhibition of Pierre Gauvreau and Janine Carreau in Vancouver in 2011. It was to begin with an intimate exhibition of works by both artists in the Baron Gallery in August. In October and November the plan was to expand into the wide-open spaces of the Pendulum gallery for a retrospective exhibition devoted to Pierre Gauvreau, especially including some of his largest pieces. Rosemary Baron Swingle reports that Gauvreau’s death has caused that project to be postponed, but    it    will    be    launched    again    around    this    time    next    year. Pierre Gauvreau died on Thursday, April 7. Le Devoir had a front-page picture of him with articles spread over three pages in their weekend edition of April 9-10, while other newspapers and the French- language media in general made much of him. There was an intimate gathering of friends at his studio in the Eastern Townships on Sunday, April 10, and on May 15, there was a large public commemoration at Montréal’s Théâtre du Nouveau Monde, with readings and testimonials by friends and colleagues, including some of Québec’s best-known actors and performers.

-Ray Ellenwood

Art = Liberation Opening 

Intersections: Historical Walking Tour of Gastown

Images from Special Exhibition of Intersections in Celebration of Vancouver’s 125th Anniversary on June 23rd

Intersections Opening

Playing With The Exquisite Corpse Exhibition

Quiet Presence

Playing with the Exquisite Corpse: Musical edition (Facilitated by Choo-Kien Kua)

Returning to Canada I moved to Toronto to explore what another city had to offer. I had always been inspired by beauty and upon meeting model Anna Bertram I was catapulted into the world of fashion photography. I stay inspired by always pushing my own boundaries and exploring different mediums of creating art.

Artist Website