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| Hugues Charbonneau speaking of his luminous new art space in front of Manuel Mathieu's colourful abstract paintings. Photo © Lena Ghio , 2022 |
FRANÇAIS app de traduction à gauche
MANUEL MATHIEU >
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| Manuel Mathieu Photo © Lena Ghio , 2022 |
Manuel Mathieu made headlines in recent years for launching the biggest personal injury lawsuit in Britain after being struck by a man driving a stolen moped in November 2015 when he was studying for a Fine Art masters at Goldsmiths. I refer to the incident because when we met him in the recently refurbished new space of Galerie Hugues Charbonneau he mentioned how his recovery had impacted his perception of life, how he was able to produce his artwork and how his thought processes operated in general. In my opinion, the trauma of the accident still affects him deeply. It is hard to explain but every once in a while we can catch him in a far away reverie.
He is a gentle and thoughtful man who took us on a descriptive tour of the gorgeous paintings you will see at Galerie Hugues Charbonneau on the fifth floor of Montreal's Belgo Building.
His international reputation is built on his thickly layered paintings that blend abstraction with figurative motifs. Some spaces on the canvases are thinly covered while others are so thick with multicoloured layers of paint they look like ceramic.
The exhibition features sculptures, paintings, poetry and drawings that take us to the depths of our human concerns; like the colourful painting below, Study on Death, 2022; to more mundane situations like in L'Éveil, 2022 where we get the sense that someone is having their morning coffee.
Manuel Mathieu: Dear mélancolie will be shown until October 22, 2022. I hope you take it in.
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| Study on Death, 2022 © Manuel Mathieu |
DIANE ARBUS > Photographs, 1956 -1971
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| Diane Arbus (1923-1971), Untitled (49), 1970–1971, gelatin silver print; printed by Neil Selkirk, sheet: 50.8 x 40.6 cm. Art Gallery of Ontario, anonymous gift, 2016. Copyright © Estate of Diane Arbus |
The first ever photograph I saw of Diane Arbus was Child with a toy hand grenade in Central Park, taken in 1962. It was featured in an old magasine and I remember having been moved by the bizarre countenance of the child and his very thin frame.
Her uncanny and unflinching look at the limitless morphologies and lifestyles of the people who were in New York city in the mid twentieth century is prophetic as it presages what many individuals are struggling with today in terms of forging their identity.
Perhaps she identified with those that society identifies as misfits as she suffered from emotional distress; from the description of the symptoms it looks like she was bipolar with huge mood swings; and ended her life at age 48 in 1971.
The exhibition takes us in the changing rooms of drag queens in the city nightclubs, it captures the many ethnicities that moved in the bustling metropolis, and the oddly shaped that we tend to overlook but that are so fascinating.
You can spend time with the evocative black and white photographs at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until January 29 2023.
The exhibition is curated by Sophie Hackett, Curator of Photography, AGO. Anne Grace, Curator of Modern Art, MMFA, is the curator for the Montreal presentation
MICHEL HUNEAULT > INCIPIT - COVID - 19
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| Michel Huneault presenting his exhibition INCIPIT – COVID-19 / Photo © Lena Ghio , 2022 |
The McCord Museum has commissioned photographer Michel Huneault in the spring of 2020 to freely document all he could about the emerging COVID pandemic in Montreal. It felt so strange to revisit these tragic scenes of people suffering, waiting in lines to get tested, older people dying, front line health care workers with their faces scared by all the protective clothes and masks they had to wear.
I was shocked by how quickly I had forgotten certain features of the early pandemic. We were so uninformed and went through it almost blindly.
The visit will surely evoke memories, especially if you lost family members or friends due to COVID.
The exhibition is ongoing until January 22, 2023 at the McCord Museum.
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