Nordic Landscapes, the exhibition of new work by Marc Séguin in Ottawa, came as a bit of shock. I knew that Séguin had built his career on a seemingly unrelenting series of dark and brutal images that employed provocative use of serial killers, terrorists, crash sites and the like, so I steeled myself for what I was about to see and still found myself completely unprepared. In a sequence of ten new oil paintings, the artist has rather straightforwardly rendered pleasantly picturesque views of northern Quebec and Labrador. Washed out applications of colours softly stain raw canvas to effectively produce barren and expansive terrain in a kind of Northern Impressionism. The paintings verge on the abstract, even more so when the composition is cropped without a clearly discernible horizon line. The slightest details become more pronounced in these minimalistic landscapes. In Paysage nordique No. 12, dark paint appears to pool in crevices. On Paysage nordique No. 11 (trois loups), red and white brush strokes apply plus and minus signs atop bare tundra to manifest an ambiguous symbolism. These paintings were inspired by Séguin’s hunting and fishing trips in the area, as well as by his recent experience shooting a feature film there. Previously, Séguin has said that he felt it was his duty to pursue in paint what deranged or disturbed him. These easily enjoyable works indicate perhaps that the trips up north have helped to mellow him out. 
Marc Séguin, Paysage nordique No. 11, 2014, oil on canvas
The exhibition marks a homecoming of sorts: Séguin was born here and you might say that at present his chickens have come home to roost. His gallerist in Ottawa, Jean-Claude Bergeron, has organized a small retrospective in Gatineau to coincide with Nordic Landscapes by gathering together a range of works from 1996 to 2014, the majority of which are on loan from collectors in the region. The title of the exhibition at Galerie Montcalm, The Trophy Room, plays on the collectability of Séguin’s work but also underscores the artist’s approach to painting as a form of hunting, and from the looks of it he is only interested in big game. A rogue’s gallery, the room is populated by portraits of artists, writers and political figures both reviled and revered that take on iconic status in Séguin’s mythos. His treatment of portraiture resides somewhere between adornment and defilement. F.B. 8 (Francis Bacon) is sketched in like a graffiti stencil with a crude handgun in red pointed at the subject’s ear, his eyes hollow red circles. The whole surface is varnished and cracked like a shattered pane of glass. In Portrait Degenerate Art (Hitler) the entire profile has been effaced by impasto globs, with streaks of red oil spewing from the subject’s mouth. Peevish mark-making common to all the work suggests a disdain for the void. Hommage à Mark Rothko (Isabelle Huppert) is a stark circumscription of color field painting divided into zones of supplication and desecration. In it, a masked figure kneels below and supports on her head a dark mass of tar in which an actual taxidermied heron is immobilized. In Gatineau, the etchings produced to date from Séguin’s Ottawa Suite are also on display. Inspired by Picasso’s Vollard Suite, Séguin’s series of prints for Bergeron reproduce his compulsive collection of trophies on a smaller scale. 
Marc Séguin, Paysage nordique No. 6, 2014, oil on canvas
The proximity of both exhibitions affords visitors the opportunity to get caught up with Séguin’s work and discern a continuity in his aesthetic strategies that suggests there is a darker side to his Nordic Landscapes. In the same way that I suspect there is a calculated agenda behind Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s seemingly benign arctic tours, I can’t but think that Séguin is playing the wolf in sheep’s clothing with these new paintings. These are not paintings of unspoiled wilderness. Paint itself becomes an intrusive element like other refuse starkly offset by the landscape. In Paysage nordique No. 10, sheds left abandoned by a mining company are foregrounded with the childish outline of a house roughly painted in white. In Paysage nordique No. 6, the serene muted colour of permafrost is disrupted by a riot of thick swirls of paint. Though appeasing and softly appealing, here and there the tranquil surfaces of these paintings roil with great gunky blobs of oil paint. I’m led to speculate about the oil below the surface by the amount of it on top.
Galerie Jean-Claude Bergeron: http://galeriejeanclaudebergeron.ca/
Marc Séguin: Nordic Landscapes continues until September 28.
Galerie Montcalm: http://www.gatineau.ca/galeriemontcalm/
Marc Séguin: The Trophy Room continues until October 5.
Michael Davidge is an artist, writer, and independent curator who lives in Ottawa, Ontario. His writing on art and culture has appeared in BlackFlash, Border Crossings and C Magazine, among other publications. He is Akimblog’s Ottawa correspondent and can be followed on Twitter @MichaelDavidge.
↧
Marc Seguin at Galerie Jean-Claude Bergeron & Galerie Montcalm in Ottawa
↧