Charles Gagnon

Charles Gagnon: The Appropriation of Meaning By Gilles Godmer After reading an article in The New York Times on a number of innovative new figures in the New York art scene, Charles Gagnon decided to go and live in the U.S. metropolis. This decision, taken in the spring of 1955, thrust the then 21-year-old youth into the extraordinary artistic effervescence that characterized New York at the time. It was a decision that would determine the path of his artistic career. At a time when other young Montreal artists were looking to Paris, this served to underline Charles Gagnon’s strong individuality – his free spirit and the qualities of openness, readiness, genuine curiosity and determination that continue to be the wellspring of a substantial body of work that is original and complex. Its coherence is remarkable and exemplary from every point of view. One of the most inspirational leaders in Canadian art over the past 40 years, this painter, photographer and filmmaker began his career by rejecting the place carved out for him in his father’s brokerage firm. Instead, he enrolled at the Parsons School of Design and took art history courses at New York University, later attending the New York School of Design. Stimulated by the artistic fervour all around him, he painted, took pictures, haunted galleries and museums, and discovered new interests, including Zen philosophy and experimental film. This five-year period, prior to his return to Montreal in 1960, marked him deeply, and continues to inspire one of the first multidisciplinary artists of his generation. No one who has ever met Charles Gagnon – a man who is passionate and curious about everything, loves to experiment, and is fascinated by philosophy, science and history – is surprised that his work has taken such diverse forms, explored such varied media and made so porous the boundaries between disciplines, bringing them together in creative and unexpected ways. Painting and photography have been at the core of Charles Gagnon’s artistic practice from the beginning. Despite the seductive influences of New York, he had thus already laid the foundations of the formal structures that he would continue to develop in the bands of colour on the periphery of the canvas and frame. His creative activity then turned toward collages and box-constructions, two forms he returned to in the following decades. This Paysages period was the closest his paintings came to being representational. In 1962, Charles Gagnon produced a painting and a box-construction with the same title, La Fenêtre / The Window . The first in a series, these works introduced a concept that is primordial for an understanding of the body of work that would follow. Marked by the use of green, henceforth indis-sociable from the artist, these paintings explored a clear spatial ambiguity. Continuing this creative process, he began a new, more experimental cycle: the frames of certain works presented irregular forms. In some pieces, stainless steel and aluminum were introduced. And the relationship between painting and sculpture was briefly examined. His prolific, diversified production also resulted in a silk-screening project with a text by his friend, the composer Toru Takemitsu (The Colour of Time, The Sound of Space / La Couleur du temps, Le Son d’un espace , 1967). There were also sound collages. Parallel to his photography, the artist explored experimental film and produced three films: Le Huitième Jour / The Eighth Day (1966), presented as part of the program of the Christian Pavilion at Expo 67; Le Son d’un espace (1968); and Pierre Mercure 1927-1966 (1970), in memory of the friend who had died tragically some years earlier. A fourth and final film, R-69, remains unfinished to this day. The end of this decade was marked by a considerable production of white paintings that are inextricably associated with the artist. These highlight and contrast the peripheral border of the canvas – more or less wide, uniformly coloured and outlined – and the pictorial field, a sort of whitish, highly atmospheric screen made up of brushstrokes that capture the light, making it dance across the entire surface. Occasionally, the presence of unexpected objects – a chain linking two panels or a plumb line hanging from the lower part of the framework – provide humorous breaks in the formal character of the canvas. Although fully absorbed with his creative work, Charles Gagnon began a teaching career in 1967 that would last close to 30 years. Until 1975, he taught filmmaking and photography in the communication arts department at Loyola University (now Concordia) in Montreal; then, until 1995, he taught film, video, sound and mixed media in the visual arts department at the University of Ottawa. He has trained an entire generation of artists who accord him enormous respect and admiration, and his influence is apparent in their work. In spite of several years of remarkable artistic accomplishment, Gagnon underwent a period of doubt regarding his work as a painter, and in the early 1970s, he ceased painting for several months. Other forms of expression and other projects caught his interest during this time, including the photography that he practices to this day. For the first time, the public became familiar with his photographic expression through an exhibition organized by the Vancouver Art Gallery that toured throughout the country. The gradual return to painting came about via collages and box-constructions, along with the simultaneous production of two important series in 1973: Marker / Marqueurs and Splitscreenspace . In the latter, the division into horizontal bands and the terracing of vast pictorial fields, overcast and tormented, led to the large mural Timescreen – Thoughtspace (1975) – a “spiritual telegram” in the artist’s words – created in homage of former Prime Minister and Nobel Peace Prize winner Lester B. Pearson, and displayed at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa. These were followed by other major paintings, including the Cassations and Inquisitions series. In the former, the space, geometrically circumscribed by three sides of the frame, demarcates a sort of gateway through the inscription of a rectangle within the rectangle formed by the painting. Unlike what we observe in Inquisitions , no distance separates the two spaces thus created. Simultaneous to this production, he produced two significant photographic suites, SX 70 and Minox, and in 1978 the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts organized his first major retrospective, including recent paintings and photographs. This exhibition toured the country. In between travels that nourished his photography, Charles Gagnon began to create canvases using words, which introduced a further visual and conceptual ambiguity. Well in evidence in the middle of the painting, the word would be painted in a uniform style, standing out against a coloured, agitated background that it would cause to recede. This process was directly linked to the creation of a mural for the Odeon cinema chain in Montreal. The 1990s began with two trips to the American desert that strongly influenced his subsequent production, and culminated with two major retrospectives: one of photography at the Musée du Québec, and one of his overall body of work at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. Over these last years, photography and painting have alternated and, in a sort of innovative and fertile dialogue, come together in a way that was probably inevitable. In Gagnon’s more serious, almost mystical works, we find monochromatic paintings in sober colours alongside photography representing sky, sea and desert. Like a completion, these works confirm the place that the unceasing, inspiring landscape has always occupied in his work in so many ways. Together with the rest of his artistic production, they emphasize his unique way of being “present in the world,” and his attitude toward everything that surrounds him, and life that endlessly fascinates him. The work of the past 45 years, developed outside the trends and currents of the mainstream, is also a way of striving for knowledge of the self and the universe. In this respect, Charles Gagnon – for whom the world has always been a place of discovery, appropriation and knowledge – is a humanist in the truest sense of the word. Gilles Godmer has been a curator at the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal since 1983. He has also taught art histrory at the Université de Montréal, as well as in the Master’s program in museology at the Université de Québec à Montréal. NOTES: Interview with Olivier Asselin, in Charles Gagnon: observations, Musée du Québec, Québec, 1998.