La Pastèque marks 15 years
Website offers one-stop guide to art galleries
Alittle more than 15 years ago, Martin Brault and Frédéric Gauthier turned their passion for bandes dessinées — known in English as comic books, comix or graphic novels — into a publishing business they called La Pastèque.
“There were active artists in Quebec, but no (French) publishers,” Gauthier said in an interview. “We worked in bookstores. We had to learn how to make, publicize, distribute and sell books. We made many mistakes.”
But the pair learned from their mistakes, he said. Their first success came in 1999 with Michel Rabagliati’s Paul à la campagne. Business began to take off after La Presse gave the book full-page coverage, he said.
Quebec’s BD scene is now mature and is being refreshed by new, young artists, Gauthier said. The company’s 15th anniversary “is the right moment,” he added, for the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts to install Comics at the Museum: 15 Artists From La Pastèque Reinterpret the Collection.
The artists were given four months to search the museum’s database of 35,000 pieces, Gauthier said. Each artist chose a piece and created a story around it.
Most of the artists created wordless cartoons, but some of the more whimsical cartoonists needed text. Janice Nadeau used a linen fabric from the design collection to tell a story about her childhood.
Rémy Simard needed no words to create a story about a 1932 chromeplated turnstile from the design collection. The turnstile is stored in a barn, where it is discovered and sold to the museum. A chick hatched in a nest atop the turnstile makes an improbable journey to find his nesting spot’s new home.
Quebec BDs are noted for their merging of European and American styles, Gauthier said. Many of the province’s BD artists use the clear lines that distinguish European cartoons like Hergé’s Tintin and mix them with an American sense of colour and detail, as exemplified by Robert Crumb.
Jean-Paul Eid and Réal Godbout fit into this category, with narratives that get much of their strength from realistic drawing styles.
Godbout took an etching that Marc-Aurèle Fortin made of Montreal’s harbour during construction of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge and created a series of scenes from an identical vantage point that depict the harbour as a reflection of Montreal’s development.
The exhibition’s tour de force is Pascal Blanchet’s deconstruction of a plywood chair designed by the husband-and-wife team of Charles Eames and Ray Kaiser Eames in 1945-46.
The Eameses were hugely influential in postwar American design, creating comfortable, high-quality furniture that could be mass-produced. (Their motto, according to the Library of Congress, was: “The most of the best to the greatest number of people for the least.”)
Their LCW (“lounge chairwood”), which Blanchet chose for his project, has separate pieces of moulded plywood for the back and the seat, and has rubber shock absorbers.
Blanchet adapted many of the characteristics of the Eameses’ chair. As plywood is made of thin wood veneers glued together, his piece is made of layers of silkscreen print cut-outs.
Blanchet mimics the visible stripes of the plywood’s grain and uses the bright pastel colours that were popular in interior design. He also evokes a cocktail party of the time, using the retro-futuristic style that is typical of his work in depicting the chair’s components as elegant pipe-smoking, bow-tied cartoon characters.
Although the Eames chair is an icon of mid-century design, it remains a utilitarian piece of furniture designed to be used by “the greatest number of people.” But through the intricacy and beauty of his own design, Blanchet recreates this functional object as high art to be hung on a gallery wall. Quite a twist.
Gauthier said he and Brault will come up with “something crazy” for Nuit Blanche on March 1 and a workshop for spring break the following week.
Comics at the Museum: 15 Artists From La Pastèque Reinterpret the
Collection continues to March 30 at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, 1380 Sherbrooke St. W. For more details, visit mbam.qc.ca.
A new website that provides information about Montreal’s galleries is a welcome tool for art lovers. Mélodie Hébert, whose experience is in tourism and events management, has created a site that, so far, lists more than 120 of them at Montreal Galleries (galeriesmontreal.ca).
The easy-to-navigate site includes private galleries, artist-run centres and museums; each gallery gets a page with a map and a hyperlink to its website. Vernissages, exhibitions and art news are also highlighted.
Galleries are listed alphabetically, by type and by location. A map of Old Montreal, for example, shows all the galleries in the sector and suggests a walking tour that leads to each one.
Hébert said that when she wanted to visit galleries, she had to go to several websites to get information. There are many sites with partial listings. For example, the Belgo Report lists galleries in the Belgo building, and the website of the Contemporary Art Galleries Association (AGAC) lists its members.
“I made something (a full gallery guide) that didn’t exist,” she said.
The Montreal Galleries website is free for galleries, but packages are available that add further information, she said.
Hébert and Pascal Champagne, the webmaster, do all the work on the site — which is actually two sites, one French and one English. Hébert does the translations.
Hébert has lined up an impressive group of collaborators, some of them in the early stages of co-operation. They include AGAC, the artist-run centre network (RCAAQ), Tourism Montreal and Montreal, Cultural Metropolis, a grouping of governments at all levels and business groups like the Board of Trade of Metropolitan Montreal.
Montreal Galleries is also co-producing short videos on artists and events that will appear on a new cultural website that the public television network Télé-Québec plans to launch this winter.