Published in Magazine Spirale, at the invitation of René Payant, my very first professional article ever, about Pierre Dorion’s “L’Atelier blanc” installation, exemplary of the rereading of architecture and art history that still drives him today.
Read moreIn a former apartment on rue Marie-Anne, the Appart gallery, directed by Marie France Thibault, opens its doors. This spontaneous emergence of an exhibition space located slightly outside the “normal” circuit of museums and parallel commercial galleries denotes, along with other similar initiatives, a new attitude that seems to respond to a need in the milieu. It is with the work of Pierre Dorion that the gallerist inaugurates the activities of her new gallery. The artist is already familiar with his off-circuit exhibitions; this summer, he exhibited at Montréal-Tout-Terrain and last year, in an apartment on Clark Street with Claude Simard.
The director requires each exhibitor to work in keeping with the particularities of the gallery space, its cramped conditions, the layout of the rooms… To this end, the artist (Pierre Dorion) imagines a fiction partially rooted in the space’s primary role as a dwelling. “L’atelier Blanc” would be the second studio of a nineteenth-century academic painter, ‘the one where he led a life unsuspected by all’, as the gallery press release states. With this subterfuge, Pierre Dorion both reveals and denies the gallery’s living space, using it and revealing its institutional mode of operation as a place for the dissemination of art.
Almost the entire surface of the walls and ceilings is marked by the artist’s intervention. The supposedly “neutral” white that makes the paintings visible is eclipsed by the abundance of pictorial matter. On the walls, motifs imitating wooden laths, decorative elements and frescoes in the style of Barbizon, the Group of Seven and the Classical style defeat their respective limits. Pictorial variations no longer suffice to divide the wall surface into “works”, but the viewer’s recourse to the price list provided by the gallery makes this transformation possible. The global vision of the space imposed by the original nature of the space will be grafted onto the fragmented perception of its pictorial treatment.
In the first room, the exhibition room proper, the classical paintings by the “master of the Atelier Blanc” are ironically presented in front of blocked windows, showing the distinction between the works and their place of presentation in the literalness of the space, denied in the pictorial treatment of the wall surface. A real void supplants the “usual” white walls, exacerbating our perception of the painting as an object to be seen. The works thus isolated point indirectly to the gallery’s artificial prerogative; the staging that ensures their proper viewing is on display.
At first glance, the second room appears different from the first. Pierre Dorion, who seems to take more account of real space, has created a bedroom here. In the center of the room, the fabricated metal frame of a bed is accompanied by a tin box on which rests an unfinished painting, and a cupboard in which are deposited painting frames. This staging simultaneously raises the spectre of the space’s lost original vocation as a dwelling and that of the ancient master’s body at the origin of figurative pictorial production. The space is also characterized by its materiality, and the trompe-l’œil frescoes are organized around the edges of the walls and ceiling. However, as in “Sous-sol condamné” (Condemned Basement), the artist uses the evocative power of paint to create the illusion of an extension of the space; a frame nailed to the wall accentuates the surface’s real impenetrability and denies us access to it.
By constituting itself as a theater, the painting partially denies the integrity of the material surface that supports it. Its material origin is recalled elsewhere by the “Poussin à repasser” placed on the chivalrous ironing boards that clash in the sculptural works Polémique no. 1 and no. 2, and in the unfinished painting. In his work in the rue Marie-Anne apartment, the artist invites us to see the negation of this specific place and the construction of a place for the dissemination of art and its modus operandi. At the same time, he exposes the constitution of a painting as an evocative surface, denying its simple origins. It’s a double passage from canvas to painting, from dwelling to gallery.
Pierre Dorion, Galerie Appart, October 2 to 27, 1984
Based on a commentary published in Magazine Spirale, n°48, Dec. 1984, p. 11.
Translated with DeepL.com