“This world is going to eat us alive. Don’t dress me in my grave, you know I was born naked”, sang Karim Ouellet in Unrealizable. What do emotional and distraught young artists die from? We ignore it. We guess. The performer-composer of love had been reclusive for a few years following mental health problems, intimate and professional setbacks, his friend Philippe Fehmiu revealed in substance this week. And the romantic songs of the deceased also spoke so much of the pain of living…
Thirty-seven years old is too young to turn into a cold body discovered in Quebec in the premises of the L’Unisson studio one stormy evening. The rapper from the capital turned pop singer was sidelined. Who knows the secret sorrows of the stars that the public extols as long as their name shines in the sun? Creation fueled by spleen can engender musicians, unhappy authors in a basement, a living room, a studio when inspiration takes to their heels and nothing goes right. Karim Ouellet was riding a bad wave, that’s for sure.
Cultural news since the arrival of Omicron is so often summed up in obituaries in a row. Nothing to boost the morale of the troops. Again this week, this departure of the so sensitive and talented French actor Gaspard Ulliel, whose courtesy struck me so much on the set of Just the end of the world by Xavier Dolan. And that of the frenzied Quebec storyteller Simon Gauthier.
Artists from here or elsewhere are bowing out at an increased rate, we say to ourselves. Hard times lend themselves to it, apparently. Older, they had often already disappeared from the radar, like the director Jean-Claude Lord. Some following a long illness, or out of a desire to age in peace, or because they had gone out of fashion and everyone had forgotten them. Others leave younger, after the heart has failed without warning. Accidents? Diseases? Voluntary acts? It’s blurry here and there. The pandemic is not necessarily to blame. But the dust on his heels, maybe. All these masks, these partitions, these folds, the contracts which are becoming scarce, for lack of open stages to allow musicians and performers to perform there in times of COVID-19, call vocations into question.
Death is not often at the rendezvous of interior fractures, but depression is. Some wither without making a sound. But many of them change direction, abandoning the boards or the studio for a less risky profession. Art loses feathers.
When one of our artists passes away, it makes headlines for a day and we still talk about it for a while. At best for a week, when a cultural jewel falls from its base, like the filmmaker Jean-Marc Vallée, too young to die too, with his projects in his bag and the glissando of his style. Instantly, people look back on key works with nostalgia. Take ! C.R.A.Z.Y. has not aged. Take !37.2 in the morning Neither does Jean-Jacques Beineix. Then the sand falls on the memory of these mown talents.
The wheel spins so fast, even in the time of the virus. The public struggles to concentrate for long on a vanished glory. We advance, if it is a pioneer: “It is the end of an era. Or, if he dies in the prime of life: “That artist still had so much to say. Rare are the giants like Molière celebrated with great pomp on the stages of the world four centuries after their birth. Many less triumphant legacies, volatile or not, are blown by the wind of day, whose footprints are erased by amnesia. We would like to convince the crowds: Re-read Marie-Claire Blais. don’t let die A season in the life of Emmanuel Where The deaf in the city. But his rich literary legacy is faltering, alas!
And as the heavy atmosphere lends itself to it, one thinks how much many creators feel the pain of living sung by Barbara. More than the average bear, one would say, protected from the realities of the world with more or less holey umbrellas. Old romantic cliché from the 19th centurye century, than that of the cursed poets and painters who lost their reason or jumped into the void, for lack of feeling in adequacy with their time. But a cliché which is not always unfounded. The heightened sensitivity demanded by the function, the discrepancy between the intuitive dimensions frequented by the muses and the realities of the hard floor of the cows often generate painful interior tensions. Some crack.
Whatever the reasons behind Karim Ouellet’s departure, he lost his footing and panicked. The life of artists sometimes ends on such a sad note that it inspires us with melancholic texts like this one.