The former Au beau Cadeau store will come back to life in Normandin, during the opening of the Elvé art gallery on June 21. Located opposite a large municipal park in the heart of Normandin, the building is all the more interesting because it housed the Caisse populaire Desjardins in the 1950s, notes Martin Villeneuve.
By purchasing the building to transform it into an art gallery, the latter liked the idea of contributing to the development of local heritage, while promoting the dynamism of the city center.
Brothers Martin and Éric Villeneuve worked for two and a half years to renovate the building where the Au beau Cadeau store was housed. (Guillaume Roy/Le Quotidien)
The teacher at Cégep de Saint-Félicien started collecting works about ten years ago and fell in love with the visual arts. “I’ve been collecting more seriously for five years and it’s almost become a hard drug,” he jokes. “I want to share art and I lacked walls,” he adds to justify his project which required an investment of around $225,000.
The idea of opening an art gallery has been in his head for several years, but it was when his brother, Éric Villeneuve, expressed his intention to return to the region that the stars aligned to create this unifying project. .
“I always thought that I would be the one to join him in Montreal,” remarks Martin, happy to bring his brother back to the region with an artistic project.
The creative madness of plastic
A graduate in chemistry, Éric worked in the musical world and in design studios in the city for many years. When the pandemic hit, he began doing personal visual arts projects, including working with melted plastic to make unusual paintings.
Éric Villeneuve developed a passion for creating canvases from recycled plastic. (Guillaume Roy/Le Quotidien)
“It’s as if my artistic spark came from working with plastic,” notes Éric. With plastic, the madness becomes trippy because I can improvise naturally with textures and volume, with a form of non-control.”
Upon seeing his works, Martin immediately saw great potential and over the course of conversations, he proposed launching an art gallery project in Normandin, where Éric could set up his workshop.
“With the opportunity to have an artistic residency at the Lake, we decided to return to the region with the family,” adds the artist, who is also the father of three daughters. With this project, he can now create on his own, rather than working for other artists, as was the case in the past.
The new art form he is developing using recycled plastic is paying off, as his first three exhibitions were very well received and he sold more than half of his works. Along the way, he even received a grant from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec, which gave him professional recognition allowing him to participate in various competitions to create public works in particular, or to carry out residential projects.
An expected inauguration
After two and a half years of restoring the building, the opening of the Elvé gallery is generating a lot of interest in Normandin and on the art scene, while the paintings of Marie Lemoyne and Marie Giro will be exhibited.
“I’m really happy that Martin’s project is coming to life because he’s been talking about it for a few years,” notes artist Marie Lemoyne. It’s really great for artists because there are few places to exhibit our works in the area, apart from the municipal libraries and the Vieux-Couvent.
A vocation for art
For Martin Villeneuve, the art gallery is not a project to make money, but rather a vocational project to share art. “I am an amateur gallery owner who wants to do things seriously. I want to become a professional gallery owner, but as a hobby, because I already have a full-time teaching job,” he says.
A work by Stéphane Truchon, known as the artist Traveling, who is one of the artists represented by Martin Villeneuve. (Guillaume Roy/Le Quotidien)
In addition to presenting occasional exhibitions with guest artists, as he does during the inauguration with the two Maries, his job as a gallery owner is to represent artists and promote their works. Martin Villeneuve will therefore be the gallery owner of Éric Villeneuve, Stéphane Truchon, known under the artist name Traveling Headcase, and Karine Tremblay, an artist from Normandin.
A painting by Marie Giro. (Guillaume Roy/Le Quotidien)
“I’m really happy to open the gallery and present such good artists,” notes Martin Villeneuve. In the future, the latter is thinking of opening a small café in the art gallery to serve specialty coffees, but each thing in its time, he concludes.
