Exhibition · January 2023
From My Island to Our Islands à
“My island” is Montréal. Fred was born there; he paints the Magdalen Islands, where he lives. This is the one exhibition that shows both, face to face.
Les Îles en Ville · Verdun, Montréal · 12–26 January 2023
Exhibition closed
“I am proud to be from my Island and from our Islands at the same time.”
01
My island
The city of his childhood, painted from a distance: a bridge, a clock tower, a brick cornice, and a concrete whale in a park.
02
Our islands
Where he paints today: a steeple against a burning sky, an ice-cream cone planted beside Route 199, an Acadian flag in the wind.
Two steeples, one idea
Fred names the heart of the exhibition himself: the church of his childhood, whose sheer scale awed him as a small boy, set against the church of Lavernière. Two outsized buildings, one from each island, and the same child looking up.
“There is the Church of my childhood, which impressed me as a small boy by a monumentality that contrasted with my own neighbourhood, the “faubourg à m'lasse”. A monumentality one can compare with the legendary Church of Lavernière.”
Église de Lavernière — 61×91 cm
At the Café de la Grave in 2022 this painting was called “1316, Route 199”: that exhibition was about addresses. Here it carries the name of its church, because this exhibition is about steeples. One painting, two titles — the hanging belongs to the painter.
First contact with the sea
The title says everything, and you have to know what you are looking at to hear it: this is not the sea. It is a concrete whale in a neighbourhood wading pool in Montréal. A city child's first ocean — and the straight line, fifty years later, to the Islands.
acrylic on masonite · 25.5×30.5 cm
The works in the show
Each one leads to its own page. Size and medium are those of the exhibition book's label.
