Leonard Cohen mural is focal point of festival
Local artist Kevin Ledo on nine-storey mural mission on St-Laurent Blvd.
If you happen to be ambling up the Main over the next few weeks and notice, near the corner of Napoléon St., a man with a paint brush on a lift many metres up in the air, don’t call the cops. He’s not a random tagger. His presence is legit. He is a man on a mission. A mural mission.
He is Montreal artist Kevin Ledo, and he will be creating a nine-storey-high likeness of Leonard Cohen on the south façade of the Cooper Building on St-Laurent Blvd. — just a few hundred metres from where the poet/troubadour had lived for so many years.
The Cohen tribute, expected to be completed by the end of the month, is the centrepiece of the fifth Mural International Public Art Festival, which was launched Thursday and will feature works — mostly around the Main — of artists from seven countries.
Oh yeah, this Cohen mural is not to be confused with the citysponsored, 20-storey creation on Crescent St., expected to be assembled in September. Along with granite stumps on Mount Royal and an urban rodeo in Old Montreal, the Crescent mural is one of the more nonsensical projects associated with this city’s billion-dollar 375th birthday bash.
As mentioned at the time of its announcement two months ago, Crescent has its merits — certainly with regard to city tourism — but it was not the serene Cohen’s kind of street.
There is no more compelling evidence needed than this weekend’s Grand Prix action on Crescent, where F1 aficionados will be guzzling back bubbly and gazing lustily at the sleek sports cars lining the street.
No question that the Crescent mural will be masterfully handled by Montreal artist Gene Pendon — a.k.a. Starship — and American El Mec, but, seriously, the side of a 20-storey building would be more appropriate for a Batman beacon (if our dreamer Mayor Coderre had notions of making Montreal a twin metropolis with Gotham City), but not for an homage to Cohen, a most modest man.
Perhaps even more troubling is that the Mural festival had been planning its tribute a few years before Cohen had passed away at 82 last November.
In fact, fest execs had even applied for a city grant to create its mural before the Crescent mural was announced in April and learned after that announcement they would not receive any city funding.
“We were really quite surprised after hearing that a mural was going up on Crescent for the 375th anniversary,” says André Bathalon, Mural festival co-founder. “I have nothing but great respect for the artists commissioned to do the Crescent St. mural, but we feel that Crescent St. doesn’t make much sense for a Cohen mural, that St-Laurent Blvd. is a much more appropriate place for him.
“Plus, we had already submitted our mural plan to the city of Montreal, and we were concerned because the Crescent announcement was made prior to the decision of that city committee to give us a grant. But we decided that regardless of the outcome, we would find ways to make our mural happen.”
And so they did when they found out there was no city cash for them.
“I guess it made no sense to the city to finance two murals,” Bathalon says. “But the fact is that we had wished to have the Cohen mural done years before, while he was alive in 2014, and it was with great sadness that because of circumstances we weren’t able to do it then.
“In those early days of our festival, people would often think of us as taggers and random graffiti artists committing acts of vandalism. But we were later able to show — as have many taggers and graffiti artists — that wasn’t the case, that fine art was being created.”
Bathalon credits an array of diverse local groups for getting behind the Cohen mural and helping to bring it to fruition. Among the Mural fest’s partners in the Cohen project are the Société de développement du boulevard Saint-Laurent and Federation CJA, as well as the owners of the Cooper Building, Moishe’s and parking lots in the area.
“It’s thanks to the involvement of these different groups that we are finally able to put this together in an area that meant so much to Cohen and in an area where so many knew him and saw him on a daily basis. It really shows that when a project is so relevant to so many that people from all over will come together.”
Bathalon points out that mural artist Ledo is from the ‘hood,’ having grown up not far from Cohen’s flat facing Parc du Portugal: “By getting him to do this in Cohen’s neighbourhood, which is also Ledo’s Portuguese neighbourhood, we feel that we have been able to complete this circle.”
Ledo, for his part, is flattered to have been selected for the project.
“I feel like this mural is so important, and it’s such an honour for me to be painting Leonard Cohen.
“My goal is to capture the essence of this spectacular artist,” says Ledo, who has won praise for previous mural portraits of, among many others, Janine Sutto and David Suzuki.
Bathalon hopes that the festival marks just the beginning of a series of local homages for Cohen, one of the too-few homegrown artists able to cross the linguistic divide in Montreal, and able to resonate with all cultural communities here and around the world.
“There really can’t be too many tributes for this awesome man. And, hopefully, even the Crescent mural, when it is finished, will at least infuse some cultural knowledge into the brains of F1 enthusiasts.”