Suzanne Olivier is one of the Haut-Saint-Laurent’s most accomplished artists. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal, she devoted herself to painting in the1970s after a brief stint at the National Film Board. Her work has been shown at New York art fairs, by major North American galleries, and is in the collection of the Canada Council Art Bank. Now in her eighties, she maintains a busy studio practice in Ormstown, painting oils and pastels from autumn through spring, her summers given over to her gardens.
L’intime et l’universel at Salle Alfred-Langevin presents nineteen oil paintings – mostly large, and nearly all very recent – in which Olivier examines feelings of powerlessness in the face of environmental destruction and, according to the gallery notes, uses her art “to expose the part of the unconscious and of reality that feeds our collective anxieties.” The work is timely and some of the most emotionally charged she has ever produced.
Olivier’s paintings have always been about the Earth, but never specific places or accurate representations of it. She paints by looking inward. “I like to think that one paints one’s emotions, one’s inner world, one’s unconscious,” she says, “and that this is what matters most.” In the space between figurative and abstract, she intuitively “feels” a horizon into her landscapes to bring, as she puts it, “a human meaning to the artwork.” Areas of colour coalesce into shapes that resemble things of this world – hillsides, mountains, storm clouds, fire – without precisely describing them. The French Symbolist poet Mallarmé once said: “To name an object is to destroy three-quarters of the pleasure we take in the poem.” The ambiguity of Olivier’s paintings is a gift to the viewer who must try to decipher them; frustrated, the rational mind must open itself to new possibilities for seeing and feeling.
Decades of practice have given Olivier an internalized understanding of how colour works, how it soothes or provokes, how colours interact and control composition. In L’intime et l’universel she has moved away from the gentler blues and earth tones of earlier work toward more unsettling colour choices: lemon-yellows, acid yellow-greens, bright scarlet, pinks and violets. In Dans un volcan, a sickly yellow-green sky roils above a terrain with an orange foreground, while on the wall beside it, Le ciel qui gronde sur le monde shows a massive mauve-pink cloud set in a turbulent bruise-coloured atmosphere while (possibly) raining fire over a sulfurous yellow plain. These bright colours, often symbolic of light and life (one painting is called Renaître) bring little comfort. The intensely yellow Malgré tout la lumière is radiant but pulses with dark energy. The overall atmosphere in the room is one of disquiet.
The process is visible in the paintings’ surfaces. Olivier has been known to work on some paintings for years, allowing colour and composition to slowly evolve. Her brushwork, once built from drawing-like linear strokes interspersed with flatter areas of colour, is now rougher and broader, with more areas of thick paint. This is especially evident in Le Chaos, dominated by a central smear of oranges and yellows, above which smoky greys and greens are split by a shaft of pale light illuminating what might be a mountaintop with a cross at its pinnacle. It is strangely reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s 1808 Cross in the Mountains, had he painted it during the Anthropocene with the landscape around him on fire.
There are moments of respite. Le bleu des mouches à feu evokes a field of fireflies at dusk; the smaller Naissance offers hopeful, delicate pinks.
Upon entering the Salle Alfred-Langevin, the eye is drawn immediately to a large canvas set against a black curtain. Quelque part sur la planète resembles Olivier’s earlier work: wisps of pale blue and warm-grey mists clearing around peripheral mountains to reveal a central valley bathed in golden light. It radiates beauty and calm – and is flanked by disaster: to its right, the flame-orange and grey La bête qui gronde; to its left, Survivre, where flames pour down a mountainside, spitting embers into soot-choked air.
These are not factual paintings teaching us what we already know about our impact on the natural world. Instead, they ask us to stop and feel what it is like to be alive inside an ecological crisis.
L’intime et l’universel con-tinues at the Salle Culturelle Alfred-Langevin at 10 Rue King in Huntingdon until May 17, on Saturdays and Sundays from 1 to 4 p.m. and weekdays by appointment.