FABRIQUER QUATRE DÉCENNIES (1982 - )
Creating printed art requires a combination of expertise and resources and demands a high level of commitment, as much physical and mental as temporal. The artists who make up Atelier Circulaire's membership have spent years sharing their time: creating, participating, collaborating and educating. These shared qualities are intrinsically linked with the values that this centre of printed arts has demonstrated for forty years.
Fabriquer quare décénnies centres building as an action—building a place, artworks, relationships, research, courage, freedom and dreams. Situated at the crossroads between memory and engagement with creation, this exhibition celebrates the fortieth anniversary of Atelier Circulaire's founding.
The product of research by co-curators Paule Mainguy and Audrey Beaulé, Fabriquer quatre décénnies proposes a subjective portrait of the many printmakers who work or have worked at Atelier Circulaire. Through its mandate and actions, the centre demonstrates a meaningful commitment to conserving its members' and residents' works. To that end, artists are asked to provide the centre with at least one workshop copy per year, which is kept in its archives. The act of choosing works to exhibit does necessarily involve the difficult task of choosing not to present others. Please note that a database of artist copies of our members' works is regularly maintained, added to and updated by various Atelier contributors. This formidable archive will soon be made available for consultation on the centre's website.
As such, the corpus presented today is the result of an exercise in reduction. While it's always possible to do more, to show more, supplementing to the point of saturation, we instead strove for the opposite position. We approached this challenge much as we do our printmaking: with patience, care and attention to detail, applying the appropriate quantities of material to avoid making a mess. While the definition of “conserving” implies maintaining something in the same state over time, the world of these past forty years has done everything but stay the same. In that sense, this public exhibition is for every member of the Atelier Circulaire’s community of artists―past, present and future―that it might serve as one thread in the fabric of our memories of this significant space where we have gathered and invented new possibilities together.
A text by Audrey Beaulé
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With the artworks of :
Julie Bellavance
Louis-Pierre Bougie
Xavier Charbonneau Gravel
René Donais
Talleen Hacikyan
Lucie Jolicœur-Côté
Manuel Lau
Jean Mailloux
Luce Meunier
Martin Müller-Reinhart
Shogo Okada
Jacinthe Tétrault
François Vincent
François-Xavier Marange
Alice Zwarts
Acknowledgments :
We would like to thank Jacinthe Tétrault and Rolande Pelletier for their important work in preserving and archiving the Atelier Circulaire collection. Thanks also to Julie, Célia, Moridja and Sylvestre, without whom this exhibition would not have been possible. We are grateful for the editing work of Jonny Rueda, the revision work of Maryse Andraos and the translation work of Argot.
Curators :
Audrey Beaulé (iel/they) lives and works in Tiohtià:ke (Montreal). They graduated from the Université du Québec à Montréal (UQAM) in 2023 with a master's degree in visual and media arts, focusing on queer abstraction and autotheory, through the prism of the artist's book, print art and drawing. Their work in art and design has been recognized by the Daniel Langlois Bursary, the Réal Fillion Prize and the François-Xavier Marange Bursary in Print Art. They receive funding from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Canada Council for the Arts.
After obtaining her bachelor's degree in education from Laval University in Quebec City, Paule Mainguy specialized in haute couture at the Cotnoir Capponi School in Montreal. She then turned to the graphic arts, training as an intaglio printer with master printer François-Xavier Marange at Atelier Circulaire in Montreal in 2001. Following her training, she became the printer and coordinator in charge of the intaglio section at the same studio. At the same time, she has been pursuing her printmaking practice and teaching intaglio techniques for several years. As an intaglio printer, she has worked with many contemporary printmakers and artists. On another front, she was president of the board of Atelier Circulaire from 2012 to 2015 and has served on numerous selection and acquisition juries, including Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, Fondation de l'UQAM and, in 2016, the Biennale d'estampe contemporaine de Trois- Rivières.
