Richard Deschênes

The Atomist – A Tribute to Richard Deschênes
05.18–06.17.2023
Room 1

We are a group bound together in love, admiration and respect for Richard. We have enjoyed looking closely at his art practice and have cherished this time to explore and dwell in his thinking and making process.

The Atomist is a result of our many conversations sparked by his art and life. The exhibition also responds to Richard’s wish, expressed before his death, to present the never before shown “Taiwan series”, entitled Les Atomistes 4. The images in this series are juxtaposed with other works showcased on a wall that we thought of as a reservoir, a kind of hold. It combines many works and from different times, organized together in a way we hope provides an intimate view of how Richard looked at and created art. To look as he did so deeply into an image that outlines and shapes pull apart, the very marks that make them, packed in one moment and then set around the space that compose them in the next. That little bit between each mark, the space that gives the form, pulls in and out of tangibility, creates in his works an interchange of foreground and background, of presence and absence. We’ve also included some of the intermediate images created by his process — those between spaces, positions, times — because they are compelling in and of themselves, and because they reveal palpably how he brought found images into his own drawings and paintings. The distance between them, the relevance of one to another, a connection, a way of relation.

Finally, we wanted to witness his deep bond with music by offering a glimpse into his experimental sound project The Collective that he has created with three other artists, César Saëz, Aneessa Hashmi and Catherine Bodmer. 100% improvised and experimental, the music that resulted from their weekly jams was rooted in punk and DIY, or as the group defined it: The Collective is composed of four Sunday musicians who exist solely because of their improvisibility; artsy and moody humans who like to dada and believe it is so incredibly pertinent to dada now.

— Catherine Bodmer, Sarah Greig, Thérèse Mastroiacovo, Dominique Pétrin and Bernard Schütze

We would like to thank the staff of Centre and Atelier Clark for their generous support, as well as Benoit Chaput, Sylvain Bouthillette, Paul Litherland and the friends of Suoni Per Il Popolo festival, who are dedicating a special night to Richard at the Sala Rossa, which has been his second home for the last twenty years of his life. And finally, we would like to thank the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Quebec (CALQ) for its financial contribution.