CARTE GRISE À PIERRE DORION / AILLEURS

Édouard Baldus, Robin Collyer, Guy Pellerin
The exhibition runs from April 27 to May 28, 2000
The exhibition is accompanied by a bilingual publication which includes a conversation between Pierre Dorion and Penny Cousineau-Levine.

Each year, within the context of Carte grise, Dazibao provides an opportunity to discover a particuliar artist's view on contemporary photography via an exhibition and a publication. In this context Pierre Dorion has chosen to present us Ailleurs a project including works by Édouard Baldus, Robin Collyer and Guy Pellerin.

In Ailleurs, guest curator Pierre Dorion focuses on the representation of urban architecture and landscape. The selected works allow the viewer to make connections between the photographic origins and pictorial rendering of the represented sites. The sometimes complex relationships between painting and photography are examined through the artists’ different interpretations of the urban context.

Édouard Baldus is a nineteenth-century French photographer. He participated in the "heliographic mission," an ambitious Second-Empire project that aimed to catalogue France’s architectural heritage with the aid of photography. Baldus used photoengraving, a photomechanical printing process that he had perfected. This technique allowed him to manipulate his own photographs, erasing all the elements which might have helped identify the original context of the photographed subject. The resulting images offer a documentary approach — highly detailed photographs of architecture — and contain as well a remarkable evocative power.

Robin Collyer is a Toronto artist well known for his work as a sculptor. However, for over twenty years now, he has also been a photographer. This exhibition presents digitally enhanced photographs of North-American urban landscapes. The large-format colour images display the relationships between Collyer’s sculptural work and the elements of urban architecture which inspired them. The manipulations imposed by Collyer on his photographs give rise to unusual links between art and reality.

Guy Pellerin is a Montréal painter. The works selected here are series of monochrome paintings done according to the colour of one building or other specific places. Like Baldus, Pellerin is attempting to catalogue architectural styles but limits himself in his project to a single painterly element : colour. His works, which at first glance seem part of the tradition of abstract painting, ceaselessly return us to their original referent, and to the notion of memory.

Ailleurs allows us to explore how photography, through urban architecture, has tangentially made its way into the vocabulary of painting.

Édouard Baldus is recognized as one of the most important photographers of the 19th century. Although his work is unquestionably inscribed in that century's photographic history, we know very little about his life. Baldus was born around 1813 and is believed to have immigrated to France around 1838. Between 1842 and 1851, he was probably active as a painter, since he participated in various Paris Salons during that period. It is impossible to determine exactly when Baldus began to practice photography. We do know that he founded the Société Héliographique in 1851 with, among others, Hippolyte Bayard, Henri Le Secq and Gustave Le Gray. Around this time, Baldus perfected a method of photoengraving that allowed him to create captivating high-contrast images, with all superfluous details eliminated. He published a number of photographic albums including Les Principaux monuments de la France reproduits en héliogravures par E. Baldus (Major Monuments of France Reproduced by E. Baldus Using Photoengraving). Although Baldus received the Legion of Honour in 1860, he died relatively unknown, in 1890.

Born in London, England, Robin Collyer completed his studies at the Ontario College of Art at the end of the sixties. He lives and works in Toronto. Primarily a sculptor, he also maintains an important parallel practice in photography. Robin Collyer uses photography to create unusual juxtapositions, undermining our conventional expectations of the urban landscape. In the series selected for this exhibition, the artist offers a strange view of the panorama of the city and suburbs: the text of all the advertising billboards and signs has been erased. At once familiar and unrecognizable, these images upset our reference points. Collyer’s works represented Canada at the XLVth Venice Biennale and his work is regularly shown in Canada, Europe and the United States. Recently, the Art Gallery of York University (Toronto) presented a major exhibition of his photography.

Penny Cousineau-Levine has been writing about photography since 1972. She is particularly interested in Canadian photography and in work by women. Her articles have appeared in several journals, among them Afterimage, Parachute and Canadian Art. She has also authored a number of essays published in exhibition catalogues. She has recently completed a book on Canadian photography and the Canadian imaginary. Penny Cousineau-Levine has taught photography at Concordia University since 1989, where she currently chairs the Visual Arts Department. She previously taught for over fourteen years at the University of Ottawa. Penny Cousineau-Levine has been a guest speaker at conferences in museums, universities and galleries throughout the country.

Born in Ottawa in 1959, Pierre Dorion lives and works in Montréal. Pierre Dorion is a painter, in a tradition some might consider outdated. And yet, his work, by engaging in a particular use of painting, incites serious rethinking of the history and very status of painting. He is also interested in the historical evolution of the medium, and explores the links between painting and other more contemporary media or approaches, such as installations, digital technologies and, particularly, the various techniques of image-making, including photography. His works are regularly shown in the René Blouin Gallery in Montréal and the Jack Shainman Gallery in New York. The Musée régional de Rimouski, the Southern Alberta Art Gallery (Lethbridge), the Mackenzie Art Gallery (Regina) and the Art Gallery of York University (Toronto) as well as the Centre international d'art contemporain (Montréal) have held major solo exhibitions of his work.

Born in 1954, Guy Pellerin graduated with a BA in Visual Arts from the University of Laval and a Masters from the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston. He lives and works in Montréal. Although, at first glance, his painting practice may seem fundamentally abstract — in the tradition of monochrome conceptualism — his work actually deploys a highly referential universe. The works of Guy Pellerin are always based on colour, as a reference point and as a persistent memory of a place or individual. It is as though colour, by its texture alone, can create a portrait or give rise to an image, an archaeology of memory. His works have been regularly shown in Canada, and occasionally in Europe and the United States. The Musée d'art contemporain de Montréal, the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris) and the Saidye Bronfman Centre (Montréal) have organized major solo exhibitions of his work.