Many of us admire the multidisciplinary artist René Derouin. For his social and educational commitment, his fervor, his light, his ability to constantly discover new creative horizons. He is the nomad of our Americanities. A bit like the coureurs des bois of New France allergic to borders, who roamed the continent feeling at home everywhere. The painter is divided between Mexico and the house he built in Val-David. He looked for his roots in Quebec before looking beyond, embracing nordicity, studying the arts in Mexico in the wake of muralists and even in Japan, feeling the millennial stylistic codes from the old empire.
In 60 years of creation, the one who has explored engraving, drawing, writing and sculpture ensures that he looks at the world like a bird in flight. Great hybridity turns it on. He feels himself as a being of mixed race on the way.
To this eternal optimist, I ask: “How can we not be worried about the ecological threats that hang over the future?” “He replies:” From the catastrophe will be born the solutions. »We would like to believe it …
René Derouin will not stop anytime soon, helps children find the artist in them, illuminates the Precambrian Gardens with his foundation, regularly migrates to Mexico, his second homeland, returns to the fold, offers his beautiful smile and his support to those who cross him, without ceasing to create.
I love his series of voracious birds whirling around to swallow their prey, like crooked financiers, or covering the whole space. The main canvas is titled The wall of birds of prey, in response to Donald Trump’s fences on the Mexican border. Political and aesthetic act, homage to all the damned of the earth.
We met him the other day at the Society for Arts and Technology (SAT). It was during the viewing of Territories of the Americas, immersive production by Patrick Bossé dedicated to his work. It can be seen in Montreal until November 27, as part of the RIDM. Since the summer, on a portable or permanent dome, this impressionist portrait of René Derouin is posed here and there in Quebec and will continue its journey until winter 2023.
A strange filmic object projected on 360 degrees which focuses less on the artist’s works than on the isolated motifs that dot them, here floating in front of us, the keys opening onto his creation and his spirit at various times in his life. This uprooted man is rooted all the same, despite himself perhaps. Val-David is its port.
His relationship with the St. Lawrence, facing which he spent his early childhood, had been marked by the double tragedy of a brother and a father swallowed in turn by its waters. We understand his crack while listening to him tell how his mother had then turned her back on the river to settle further with him. Since then, his gaze has sought to settle elsewhere than in front of his flats.
I had admired in the capital, at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, his terracotta figurines from the series Migrations, characters with each their profile, their costumes, their burdens, first exhibited in Mexico City. These miniature wanderers were the great steps that tear humans from rotten cradles to seed them in other countries.
In a liberating and heart-breaking gesture, in 1994 he dropped at the bottom of the St. Lawrence – this ogre who gobbled up brother and father – 19,000 of his ceramics out of 20,000; the vast majority of the figures in this series. After refusal of the MNBAQ to store so many pieces, loath to become caretaker of his work, in a gesture of liberation too, he had relieved himself in the river abysses. Fish, sirens, fragments of ancient wrecks now keep them company. Gesture carrying all the possible senses, with its tribute to the memory-river, this terrible god to appease, coupled with a return to the sources.
However, a few figurines remained, including 250 soon sent to a Mexican museum. Then one by one in their black box, 250 of the survivors were sent to personalities of the Quebec cultural scene. Hence in response a deluge of missives. Their anthology was published in Wake language. Letters to René Derouin, to the aptly named ephemeral shipwrecked editions, in 2020.
“It was the gesture of the sower, wrote Gaston Miron and Marie-Andrée Daudet. The seeding of the river by which the migration arrived here. “
“Now, works of art light up the bottom of our dear river,” retorted Pierre Morency. Like cave paintings radiate deep in the still virgin caves in France and Spain. “
We would like to put on a diving suit to plunge to greet them tomorrow at the bottom of their bed.