Nicolas Baier
Patrick Bernatchez
David Blatherwick
Cynthia Girard

Réponse à Zola
10.15–11.18.2006
Gallery

NICOLAS BAIER, PATRICK BERNATCHEZ, DAVID BLATHERWICK, LISE BOISSEAU, SYLVIE BOUCHARD, ALEXANDRE DAVID, CYNTHIA GIRARD, RAYMOND LAVOIE, FRANCINE SAVARD

Curator : MARIE-CLAUDE BOUTHILLIER

When one finds an artist in a novel, nine times out of ten it’s a painter. And he is — take your pick — a hoaxer, a madman, a martyr. In all my reading on the subject, I have yet to find a worse treatment of the figure than that inflicted on Claude Lantier, the hero of the novel L’Oeuvre, by its author Emile Zola. His life is one long agony.

In novels, the painter must ruin his life and, almost invariably, his work. We can do nothing for the life, but for the work? I called nine artists to the rescue and asked them to take on the role of a character and create a pictorial work that would echo an “artist novel.” One had to make an actual picture, in the real world, of one of the impossible artworks in the novel. No one chose Claude Lantier… I think the task of redressing the affront done to him was too great… Poor guy.

MCB