In this new series of works, the artist continues his pictorial explorations by engaging with 19th-century Canadian landscape prints. This recent production draws more specifically on prints sourced from newspaper archives, created between 1870 and 1885. These images, whose composition followed the classical conventions of landscape painting, illustrated current events at a time when photography was still in its infancy. By exhuming these prints from obscurity, François Simard manipulates the images through abstract interventions, breathing new life into them. Through techniques such as cropping or layering, the artist removes all narrative or historical elements from the representations, poetically highlighting the enduring nature of these forests, mountains, lakes, and rivers in contrast to the fleetingness of human existence. While the depicted sites – identifiable by their titles – remain recognizable today, the creators of the prints have fallen into anonymity.
Left: François Simard, Chutes de la riviere Metis, 1873, 2025, Acrylic on antique print, 27 x 23.4 cm
Right: François Simard, La baie Kennekcasis, 1871, 1873, 2025, Acrylic on antique print, 23.5 x 34 cm