Roy Heenan’s Charles Gagnon Paintings
Charles Gagnon “Cassation / May, P.M. / Mai, 1978”
Oil on Canvas, 1978, 58 x 68 in.
Exhibited: Charles Gagnon, Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, National Gallery of Canada, Vancouver Art Gallery, Art Gallery of Ontario, Winnipeg Art Gallery, 1978 (cat #123)
Charles Gagnon was one of the generation of Montreal artists born during the 1930s that included Claude Tousignant, Guido Molinari and Yves Gaucher. Gagnon stood out from the others, exploring various media such as film, photography, collage, box constructions as well as painting. At a time when other Montreal artists were looking to Paris, Gagnon was heavily influenced by his time spent in New York from 1955-1960. His style of painting, unlike his “plasticiens hard-edged” friends, was more akin to the abstract expressionist movement in the US.
In the 1970s Gagnon’s pictorial works explore aerial spaces. The Cassation series presented large, light-hued fields, generally monochrome but animated by myriad shades of tone, value and gesture. He evoked cloudy skies or other meteorological phenomena viewed up close through a window, or the frame of a photograph or film camera.
The pictorial space is geometrically divided, parallel with the framing edges, by a rectangle in the rectangle of the canvas. The width of the division of space in the Cassation paintings are virtual lines, produced by the confluence of fields.
(from Charles Gagnon: A Retrospective, Musee d’art contemporain de Montreal, Exhibition Catalogue, 2001)
Charles Gagnon “Inquisition WTR/HVR #1”
Oil on Canvas, 1981-2, 80 x 72 in.
Exhibited: Charles Gagnon: A Retrospective, Musée d’art contemporain Montreal, 2001 (cat #108)
Gagnon’s compositional style is also heavily influenced by his interest in photography and film. Similar to his earlier Cassation paintings, the pictorial space is geometrically divided in his Inquisition paintings. In the Inquisition paintings, the divisions of space are of a certain width, a neutral colour and generally grey.
Gagnon also applied words or numbers to the surfaces of his later paintings, which transformed them from self-referential entities into something like illustrations out of a scientific manual or a dictionary.
Charles Gagnon:
I started wondering about how we looked at paintings. We normally read from left to right and from top to bottom, which is a very occidental concept. But do we look at painting the same way? I started incorporating how we normally read into my work, but then came to the question of whether we really need it that way? Suppose we notice things differently? Big things before small things? So I started adding labels, a,b,c,d and 1,2,3,4, to deal with how we read in terms of scale, which in turn brings in perspective. I became very interested in how, depending on where you came from, you could read a work in many, many ways.
Link to Roy Heenan’s “The Life of a Bike” Exhibition HERE