Anne-Marie Cadieux portrays Riopelle's artist-wife Joan Mitchell.Supplied
The anniversaries of the births or deaths of important artists have long been used as grounds for major exhibitions of their work. But the practice of curating posthumous retrospectives has become increasingly fraught.
The times dictate that an artist’s flaws as a human must not be brushed over, nor should his prominence (and we are mainly talking about men here, of the dead white variety) amid systems of privilege that likely boosted him over other innovative and worthwhile artists.
If a gallery focuses too much on those issues, however, and not enough on, well, anybody’s art, it opens itself up to the critical pans like those received by the Brooklyn Museum’s It’s Pablo-matic: Picasso According to Hannah Gadsby, which was timed to the 50th anniversary of the Spanish artist’s death and co-curated by the Australian comedian.
Le projet Riopelle, an epic (and, in its current form, exhausting) live event helmed by Quebec director Robert Lepage, offers a contrasting approach to creative, questioning curation. The four-and-a-half hour show, co-produced by Lepage’s production company Ex Machina with La Fondation Jean Paul Riopelle is finishing a run at Montreal’s Duceppe on June 11.
It’s not being sold as a critical take on the Quebecois abstract expressionist, who died in 2002 and would have turned 100 this year. But the show – in French, created by Lepage with his frequent collaborator Steve Blanchet and playwright Olivier Kemeid – provides plenty of reasons in its narrative elements not to admire the artist as a human when he was young and seemingly selfish, or old and eccentric (and a little creepy).
Le projet Riopelle, likewise, provides ample opportunity to learn about and see (projections of) paintings of lesser-known Québécois artists who were Riopelle’s contemporaries in the 1940s and 1950s.
The first section is about the art collective Les Automatistes, and exhibits work by its founder Paul-Émile Borduas – Riopelle’s teacher who eventually lost his job for signing the art collective’s famous Refus global manifesto that foreshadowed the Quiet Revolution – as well as fellow members Marcel Barbeau, Fernand Leduc and Jean-Paul Mousseau.
The second section of Le projet Riopelle, meanwhile, largely centres on Joan Mitchell, the American abstract expressionist with whom Riopelle had a relationship from 1955 to 1979. She’s a compelling character thanks to nervy performances by Noémie O’Farrell and Anne-Marie Cadieux as her at different ages; her struggles as a female artist in France also happen to be more dramatic than what marginalization Riopelle might have experienced as a Québécker living and working there.
Can a piece of theatre featuring projected paintings really be compared to an art show, though? The lines between the visual and the performing arts have always been blurry – especially with an artist like Lepage whose atelier Ex Machina focuses as much on images as storytelling.
Indeed, one of his virtual-reality projects was recently “exhibited” at Toronto’s Lighthouse Immersive, an immersive art gallery run by theatre producers who have pivoted towards that more lucrative domain.
That critically controversial practice of projecting high-quality digital images of paintings in the public domain by the likes of Van Gogh or Monet on walls is clearly an influence on Le projet Riopelle.
The show’s structure is not like Lepage’s other works and is essentially 30 tableaux, a form inspired by Riopelle’s L’hommage a Rosa Luxembourg (1992) – a 40-metre long fresco of 30 paintings featuring the mysterious contours of geese and billiard cues that was more of a tribute to Mitchell than Luxemburg.
Le projet Riopelle begins with the aged Riopelle (Luc Picard; Gabriel Lemire plays him when he is young) beginning work on l’hommage a Rosa Luxembourg, his largest oeuvrage, upon hearing of Mitchell’s death; and it ends with a news conference for its unveiling at the Casino de Hull by a Parti Québecois culture minister. The sound and sight of slot machines slowly surround a projected image of the long, coded canvas – one of many moments in which Lepage uses irony (rather than jargon-filled gallery text) to explore questions about Riopelle and the depth of his connection to the culture of Quebec.
His show is most interesting, formally, when it builds upon the techniques developed by immersive art shows through animation and live performance. For one “tableau,” Riopelle is flown over Baffin Island in a neatly conjured private plane, the projection of the white and black contours of the snowy landscape projected below eventually revealed to be extreme close-ups of the paint that make up Quatuor en blanc – Soleil de Minuit (1977).
A more controversial element: I thought I was developing an appreciation for Mitchell’s art as well as her uncompromising approach to life through Le project Riopelle, only to learn afterwards by consulting the program that what I saw on stage included a couple of Ex Machina-created paintings “in the style” of Mitchell. In this, though, the show connects with new-found anxiety around AI-generated art (and the old ones around forgery).
Le projet Riopelle will be staged/exhibited next in Quebec City, Oct. 19 to Nov. 19 at Le Diamant, and in Ottawa, Dec. 14 to 16 at the National Arts Centre.