Left: Françoise Belu, La boîte de Jésus B (détail), mixed media, 25 X 36 X 12 cm
Right: Suzanne Blouin, La petite Suzanne en automne (détail), mixed media, 26 X 40 cm
Exhibition by Françoise Belu and Suzanne Blouin
Entitled Les unes et les autres
at Arts Sutton Gallery
From March 6 to April 11, 2010
Opening: March 6 at 2pm
Guided Tour: March 20 at 2pm
Les unes et les autres is produced through a collaboration between two Montréal artists who share a vision of contemporary art, bound to their profound explorations of the pain of childhood.
“Les unes” shows us the same photograph of Suzanne as a child, repeated many times over on a table of four reversible panels strewn with three-dimensional objects, such as bridal veils and seashells. We see her abandoned against the backgrounds of an American desert, the edge of the Saint Lawrence River, lost in the fields, the snow and elsewhere . . .
“Les autres” presents us with a set of twenty-odd black boxes that display photographs of close friends and family of Françoise as children. The backgrounds to the pictures were created using a variety of techniques and are paired with symbolic found objects, as well as scenes in which there is always the silhouette of an anonymous child.
Opening March 6, 2010. Serie by Françoise Belu. La petite Suzanne (detail), Suzanne Blouin.
Credit: Catherine Audet
Suzanne Blouin holds a Master’s in Fine Arts from l’Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM). Her work is included in various public collections such as those of the Musée du Québec and the Museum of Fine Arts in Montréal. Since she discovered collage in 1997, she has been using it as an integral part of her works, including those we will be seeing at La Galerie Arts Sutton. Each work begins with an image of herself, triggered by her earliest childhood memories. Little Suzanne, in these autobiographical fictions, reinvents herself through survival strategies of wild gestures, repeated almost ad infinitum—each set in the fullness of nature and the seasons.Francoise Belu holds a certificate of Aesthetics and the History of Modern Art from the University of Paris 1. She has participated in numerous shows and performances in Québec and France. She is inspired by ancient myths, in particular that of Oedipus, and the revelations of the unconscious as explored by Freud and the psychoanalytic tradition. Her works depict the unsayable words, drawn from a consciousness that seeks a wordless expression of self. To this day, she still cannot use images drawn from her own childhood because the pain is too intense. Instead Francoise describes the childhood “des autres.”
The public is invited to open to the subtle awareness of these two artists as shown in their works on display at Arts Sutton.