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

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

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

March 18th to April 30th 2010

Cuba is the lazy swaying of hips through broken solariums and hungry eyes following the sight of fresh meat

-they only had Canadian chicken thighs at the state market-

Cuba is cockiness dressed in spandex.

Cuba is always being moist from the steam rising off the ground after it rains,

from pedaling around two fat Russians on a bici taxi,

from fighting your way off a crowded bus, from skilled Cuban fingers, and hands, and mouths, and tongues…

-Cuba is men who can use their mouths- Oye!

Cuba is having a relative or neighbor in every state of the Junaited Esteits

-even Alaska!-

Cuba is music made with tin, empty glass, sticks, and an old guajiro.

-Ry Cooder came later-

Cuba is a white woman with kinky African hair, green Irish eyes, a Japanese husband, and a lover from Wisconsin

Cuba is resistance for a cause. What cause? THE cause cried Pinero.

-Hasta la Victoria Siempre!-

Cuba is sex. family. music. food.

What else is there?

- by Keila Ramirez

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.

Painter and musician Tom Carter is an artist from Vancouver, Canada best known for paintings that explore sombre, gritty, working-class, urban environments with subtle glimpses of hope and warmth. The stage is always urban and the city is usually Vancouver, set in the period around the 1950. Viewing the city streets as they were the viewer can explore and absorb the scenes with a neutrality removed from the emotionally charged present.

Vancouver, like all living cities, is a work in progress – constantly moving, growing, tearing down and rebuilding. Newcomers see a very different city today. The city was once a regional, working-class town of sawmills and shipping ports with the smell of creosote and lumber mixed with salty air and diesel smoke.

“Even though I might take artistic license occasionally, I endeavor to capture the spirit of the city as I feel it,” says Carter. “Through Vancouver’s heritage programs, its citizens preserve the actual buildings and artifacts. Through painting, I preserve the intangible but felt spirit.”

About Goat Money:

“It all started with a birthday party…

When my sister came to my birthday party this year, she brought along a jar with a label that said ‘Goat Money’ and had a hand-drawn picture of a goat. Her request was for friends to throw their pocket change into the jar as a way of raising enough money for her Biology instructor, Catherine Glass, to buy one goat for one woman in the small village of Olkoroi, Kenya.

The change we gathered was enough to buy one goat – about $20.

I was interested to know more about the difference that our goat would make, and wanted to meet Catherine and hear about her involvement with the community. We met for dinner, she told her story, and having donated art pieces to fundraising events in the past, I knew that we could do more to help.

We decided to put together an art auction.” – Korey Moran

Preview from May 3, 2011

Silent and Live Auction Event
Wine & Cheese
7pm Thursday May 5, 2011

Goat Money website