Gauvreau, Pierre

1 product

Request for information

Pierre Gauvreau, a great Canadian automatist painter

A great Canadian master, the painter Pierre Gauvreau was born in Montreal in 1922 (died in 2011). Pierre Gauvreau studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montréal after completing the Lettres cycle at Collège Sainte-Marie. He is an automatist painter. Paul-Émile Borduas wrote of him in Indiscrétions (winter 1947-1948): "Pierre the born painter. The most serene revolutionary painting there is. Dawn or setting sun […]." Attempting to define Pierre Gauvreau's painting is impossible given the breadth and vast scope of his creation. Several periods punctuated his research. A signatory of the Refus global (like, among others, his brother Claude – a fundamental poet and playwright), Pierre Gauvreau remained faithful to the spirit of surrealism throughout his life. Abstract painter? Labels do not stick to his creative output.

A painter with many talents

After the Automatist adventure, he joined the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation where he would become one of the most important directors. From the early 1950s onwards, the painter was seen less, even though he did not abandon his pictorial practice. He made a notable comeback in 1975 with an exhibition composed of recent works that renewed his language, without having lost the essence of the Automatist and the spirit of the Surrealist. In addition, the exhibition was enhanced by his other professional and creative activities at Radio-Canada and the National Film Board of Canada. His contribution to our society is vast. Painter, screenwriter, director, author, filmmaker… His language and his approach will have marked Quebec in all its practices

“A great among the greats!” Robert Bernier

"Pierre Gauvreau's painting, whether from today or tomorrow, is and always will be an act of lucidity and conviction." Robert Bernier
 From 1960 to 1975, he abandoned painting. In 1976, he picked up his brushes again and tirelessly pursued his artistic exploration. In his most recent work, Pierre Gauvreau uses mattes and aerosols, which gives his works a raw, artifice-free character.

"Pierre Gauvreau's painting, whether of today or tomorrow, is and always will be an act of lucidity and conviction." Robert Bernier
A Quebec painter, Pierre Gauvreau's artwork can be found in several important private, public, and corporate collections. From October 2013 to September 2014, a major exhibition organized by the Musée de la civilisation in Quebec City paid tribute to Pierre Gauvreau and his world, "Pierre Gauvreau. I hoped to see you here."

ADDITIONAL ARTICLE(S):

Pierre Gauvreau (1922-2011)

Pierre Gauvreau is well known to the general public as the author of the television series Le temps d'une paix, Cormoran, and Le volcan tranquille. Many people know that he paints, but too few people are aware of his true importance as an artist. His entire body of work places him among the most influential painters of the last sixty years. Of course, Gauvreau was an automatist. He wrote Refus global, and already, in the 1940s, he was one of the brightest hopes of our painting. However, the influence of this essential artist far exceeds the, if not limited, at least restrictive, idea that one might have of him. For his painting has lived beyond history.

Since 1976, the year he picked up his brushes again after temporarily interrupting his pictorial creation, he has tirelessly pursued his plastic exploration with astonishing vitality, leading his expression to constant renewal while remaining in the continuity of his previous creative actions. In fact, if we generally make a marked distinction between Gauvreau the director and Gauvreau the painter, the former sees his different activities as an inseparable whole, each one being complementary and essential to his purpose and to the way he views his environment, society, in short, life. However, for the general public, it is not always easy to forge links between these different activities. How, in practice, do the painter, the director and the author complement each other? How does Gauvreau's painting benefit from this?

The correlation between the director and the painter seems to be manifested by the fact that Gauvreau, accustomed to working in a control room, on television, with a panoply of monitors, constructs his pictorial space in sequences. His extraordinary ability to establish connections is reflected in his painting by his singular way of making all the parts of the work correspond while establishing a modulation of rhythm. Indeed, Gauvreau's paintings appear as an amalgam of forms and treatments that, at first glance, have little in common. Yet, he succeeds in creating fascinating interrelationships between the different zones. Abstract, the works tell more than they appear, although they could not be called narrative. This is part of his genius: creating dynamic spaces in which multiple correspondences intersect, building an autonomous universe animated by a life of its own, without it being possible to describe, name, or narrate the action, and without any real relationship to physical reality.

We could even speak, for some paintings, of "objective narration", since the story that is recounted is essentially pictorial. Others obey a rapid, intuitive, almost wild gesture that recalls - while distinguishing itself from - his automatist adventure, the spontaneous transcription of being, with the difference that today this dimension is added a long-term reflection, areas of weighting that further flesh out his plastic purpose; a cross between the concerns of plastic artists, the automatist spirit and the rigor of his practice. And this rigor becomes a fundamental element of his creation in that it acts as a moderator. It has already been said or written that Pierre Gauvreau is a creator of slow maturation. It is true that the artist likes to take the time necessary to create, and that the process in which he engages sometimes requires a lot of patience. But there you have it, the initial impulse is rather overwhelming for him, and it is the ordering of this impulse that requires time. When the fire is well stoked, production explodes!
In his most recent work, Gauvreau uses mattes and aerosols, which give his works a raw, unadorned character.

However, even if changing medium inevitably leads to a change in the technique, the foundations of his work remain unchanged to this day: rigor and a remarkable ability to build ever-surprising connections. In short, today as yesterday, Pierre Gauvreau acts like a great transformer. His painting is alive not only because it evolves and transforms, but also because each painting that makes up his work is a territory in which transmutation is expressed. The zonal modulation that characterizes his language carries within it the idea of ​​passage from one state to another; the sequences are the vehicle, his thought and his philosophy of life, the engine.

Source: Robert Bernier, La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2002, Gauvreau Pierre Gauvreau (1922), pages 27-29.

TO LEARN MORE:

https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Gauvreau_(painter)

https://collections.mnbaq.org/fr/artiste/600001303

https://www.lapresse.ca/arts/201104/08/01-4387829-pierre-gauvreau-est-decede.php