L’Art dans la rue
ART URBAIN MONTRÉAL ENCOURAGES PROJECTS THAT PROMOTE ART IN AN URBAN CONTEXT
It aims to culturally enrich and revitalize neighbourhoods, and develop local culture, while also giving more visibility to our artists, exploring various artistic approaches and disciplines.
The new work we are exhibiting for this l'Art dans la rue exhibition is the continuation of 2021's summer exhibition of the same name. Paper reproductions of 24X36" artworks are pasted onto city poster walls, barricades and other surfaces on the streets of Montreal.
THE ARTISTS: Danielle Lamontagne, Baudoin Wart
WHERE: In Montreal, on Publicité Sauvage's urban posting network
WINTER 2021
DANIELLE LAMONTAGNE
DANIELLE LAMONTAGNE - BIOGRAPHY
(she)
Danielle Lamontagne was born in 1962 in Montréal, where she currently lives and works. She holds a bachelor's degree in graphic design (1996) from Université du Québec à Montréal, where she also completed a master's degree in arts and letters in communication, with a specialization in interactive multimedia (2000).
Danielle Lamontagne is a visionary and one of the first artists to employ digital technology in her creations. She didn't hesitate to use technology in her art in the late 1990s, when the art world still underestimated the advantages of this medium. She launched her virtual interactive gallery Digital Image Art to share and promote her art and multimedia (video and sound) creations online.
Although she also creates on canvas and paper, her work is currently more focused on digital art and immersive media installations. These include projections, videos, digital images, sounds and complementary objects that conceptually represent the idea she wants to convey. Light and sound are ever-present features that she combines with multiple materials.
She continues to create with this same consistent spirit. Her rhythmic "silent poetry slams" are meant to elicit reflection or emotion. These poetic texts are the starting point for her art installations.
A socially engaged artist, she casts a lucid and critical eye on the paradoxes of life and humanity. Her work evokes a bittersweet, sometimes raw, poetry, in a socially engaged style reminiscent of performance art. The texts, at times contemplative and poetic, also perceptively highlight the absurdity of our modern society, offering up inspiration for a better world.
In the pursuit of a certain kind of beauty, the artist's work is also meant to evoke a new sense of interdependence and a shared responsibility for the well-being of all people, living things and future generations. A just, sustainable and peaceful way of living. The artist's work is a means of reconnecting with that original, sacred space within, a place of peace and balance.
BAUDOIN WART
BAUDOIN WART - BIOGRAPHY
(he)
Born in 1960 in Coteau-du-Lac, Montérégie, Baudoin Wart lives and works in Montréal. A multidisciplinary artist, his art is driven by instinct and unbridled energy. Painting is a way for him to connect to what is most visceral, obscure or impenetrable within.
In the early 80s, as he was entering his twenties, Baudoin Wart felt a sense of urgency to shake up established ways and to transform what he saw as insipid, stagnant and morose. He had a vision of "disrupting" Montréal's grey and tidy urban landscape, but in a constructive, generative way.
Conspiring with the cultural and artistic world, which spontaneously called on his services as a singularly efficient and conscientious poster artist, and aware of the financial precariousness of that community, Baudoin Wart created his own cultural urban posting company in 1987. Since then, PUBLICITÉ SAUVAGE has continued to add colour and movement to our city's vision.
This painter and entrepreneur has never abandoned his painting as a way "to make a living." It's also an essential way for him to encounter the invisible, a way of connect to psychic immateriality and to access what is the most mysterious and impenetrable part of himself. Wart's work is introspective, both playful and perilous, and finds itself plastered on any blank surface (paper or canvas) as if it were a field of investigation into the subconscious in which the self dies only to be born again. (B.W.)
Like automatic writing, brushes, pencils and spatulas become instruments for sudden inspiration. These flashes of revelation produce shapes, textures and colours that often detach themselves from their descriptive, representational purpose. As with the Fauvist painters, this separation of conventional colours from their usual representational and realistic role accentuates the pure expression of an unaltered unconscious, free and unbound.
Wart's spontaneously organized work transforms the act of creation into new life. These illuminations generating shapes, textures and vibrant colours rely less on concrete depictions and more on the symbolic, magical, and impulsive expression of intangible impressions. Wart's paintings reflect the unclassifiable, even "undisciplined" path of this artist for whom constancy is essentially renewal.
Text: Céline Mayrand
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