Alberto Castro Leñero and Demián Flores, two major Mexican artists, are in artistic residency for two weeks at the Baie-Saint-Paul Contemporary Art Museum. They are working together for the first time on an exhibition which will be unveiled this fall.
While parking in front of the Museum, then in the middle of work, the author of his lines saw two men putting a log of wood through a chainsaw. Tree felling? No, it’s art!
The two men from distinct generations and artistic trends knew each other’s work, but are creating together for the first time. They began designing their work in Mexico City, and now come to realize it in Charlevoix.
At 73, Alberto Castro Leñero creates through painting, sculpture and video. “Recently, I understood that what interests me is how these mediums interact in space,” he explains about his approach.
20 years younger, Demián Flores works a lot on the concepts of territory, identity and memory. “I reuse pieces of the historical past to create more contemporary forms. I put cultural, symbolic and political references there,” describes the artist.
This joint creation will therefore be a mix of their approaches aimed at creating an installation “which tries to transform the pictorial language of painting so that it unfolds in space and time”, reveals Demián Flores.
A first international residence
The idea of this first international residency at MACBSP (if we do not take into account the Symposium of Contemporary Art, in which Alberto Castro Leñero also participated in 1998!) comes from a desire to collaborate with Espacio México , the Cultural Institute of Mexico in Montreal, which suggested these two recognized artists to the Baie-Saint-Paul institution.
“The person there wants to promote Mexican artists more, but not only in Montreal. At first, it was just a residency project where it allowed them to work together, then it led to an exhibition project,” explains Gabrielle Bouchard, general director and chief curator of the MACBSP.
The DG also sees this as an opportunity to bring Charlevois residents and the Spanish-speaking community of the region closer together. “We have this big community here, and nothing is done based on them. They adapt to us, what culture do we have and everything… The exhibition is full of iconographies of South America, that can speak to them too. »
According to Gabrielle Bouchard, Espacio México will work to have the exhibition presented in other museums. After Baie-Saint-Paul, it could well spread elsewhere in Canada.
Editor’s note: thanks to Marie-Christine Mathieu for being an interpreter during the interview with the two artists.
