In Views from the Other Shore, François Simard invites the viewer to a contemplative and poetic meditation on the act of creation, memory and man’s relationship with nature.
In this new body of work, the artist continues his pictorial explorations by interacting with 19th-century Canadian landscape engravings. This latest production specifically incorporates engravings taken from newspaper archives, created between 1870 and 1885. These images, whose composition adhered to the classical codes of landscape representation in painting, illustrated current events at a time when photography was in its early stages.
In order to instill a Canadian nationalist sentiment among the readership of this fledgling country, the creators of these engravings allowed themselves some narrative liberties, punctuating their depictions with bucolic elements, such as a peaceful moose drinking from a river, or a solitary fisherman on the shores of a lake.
Unearthing these engravings from oblivion, François Simard manipulates the images through abstract interventions, thus granting them a new lease of life. Firstly, through processes of cropping or overlaying, the artist removes any narrative or historical element from the representations, poetically highlighting the unchanging character of these landscapes of forests, mountains, lakes and rivers in the face of the transience of human existence. While the sites depicted, identifiable by the title, are still recognizable today, the authors of the engravings themselves have faded into anonymity.
With his free, fluid and expressive brushstrokes, the artist reappropriates these ancient views, transforming them into a field of plastic experimentation. He infuses them with his own intimate pictorial vocabulary – abstract, intuitive and resolutely modern – made up of varied shapes, lines, textures and colors. In doing so, he reshapes the perception of these images, blurring the reading of detailed landscapes by softening lines and contours, thereby challenging pictorial conventions. The atmospheres Simard creates are sometimes enigmatic, sometimes imbued with a gentle lightness.
Each work thus becomes the scene of an unlikely encounter between two artistic movements separated by the course of a century: classical figuration and contemporary abstraction. These styles coexist on the canvas with harmonious complementarity resulting in creations that, while rich in contrast, vibrate with a striking organicity. With Views from the Other Shore, François Simard orchestrates a visual symphony of bewitching beauty, where meticulous and fluid gestures complement each other, and where shades of beige and gray subtly enhance the vibrant touches of color.
Virginie Brunet-Asselin
