Trépanier Baer Gallery shows Marcel Barbeau
13/03/2013 to 30/04/2013
Author :ROUSSEL, Daniel
Date : 01/10/2013
Entrails, Acrylic on canvas, 132 x 188 cm (52 x 74 po.), Montreal, 1991.
Barbeau and Christian Eckart opened on Wednesday, March 13 at Trépanier Baer Gallery in Calgary. It marks the beginning of a new relationship between the artist and Calgary’s great contemporary art gallery, as well as a new start on Alberta’s art scene for this pioneer in Canadian pictorial and sculptural abstraction. During this introductory exhibition, the owners of the gallery chose to match Barbeau with an abstract sculptor from Alberta, who is well established in the region and whose latest major public work is being unveiled in Calcary, on March 14 . The exposition will continue through April 6.
The part dedicated to Barbeau gathers together a selection of medium and large size paintings taken from the first sections of his Anaconstructions sequel, which have never been showed in Western Canada, that highlight in a powerful way the sculptural dimensions of his paintings. Two of these paintings, Entrailles (1991) and Fragments stellaires (1996), present the same dense, almost organic structure that forms a complex pattern through perpetual mutation. In these paintings, the artist explores the methodical construction of irregular triangles and polygons taken from a collage made in the fall of 1990. Again in 1997, Barbeau will revisit this theme in the magnificent Diamant, passerelle d’étoiles, a fascinating painting and the leitmotiv behind Manon Barbeau’s movie entitled Les enfants du Refus global, and again in 2002, in the small but brilliant painting La brise de tes yeux, as he could not free himself from the enchantment of this spellbinding pattern. Whether in black, grey and white as in Entrailles, whether in lively shades, associated with black and white, on a pastel blue background in Fragments stellaires, each time the pattern reiterates itself in a renewed manner. Thus, the exhibition shows how Barbeau worked on small series, which he did often during this period, using the same pattern again two, three, four, sometimes five times from a selected collage, metamorphosing it completely in each work. At first chosen to be part of this exhibition, another masterful version of the same study, Diamant, passerelle d’étoiles, was lent to the Musée des beaux-arts du Canada as part of an exhibition regrouping the laureates for the Governor General of Canada’s Award 2013, of which Barbeau is this year’s recipient. Three paintings from 1991 and two others created at the end of the nineties complete this part. They translate the same joy of playing with the ephemeral illusion of three-dimensionality, peculiar to this series. Some of the older works, two drawings from 1959 and 1960, inspired from serial and concrete writing and music, and one painting from 1976 – which associates tachist writing with gesturality in an all over-like composition – recall the immensity of Barbeau’s work, its diversity, its frequent use of esthetical hybridization as well as his singular path. Most of the works that will be shown in the exhibition can be seen at: www.trepanierbaer.com.
Marcel Barbeau and his wife Ninon Gauthier traveled to Calgary to attend to the opening reception. As in all other major events, they were wearing clothes designed by Yves-Jean Lacasse from Envers Design, Montréal
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