Philippe Bourdeau<\/strong>: Shall we start at the beginning? In 1983, you presented your first exhibition, Peintures\/Paintings<\/em>, at 3883 Rue Clark, in collaboration with Claude Simard. You were twenty-four years old. Can you please talk a little about how this project came about and where it led you?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pierre Dorion<\/strong>: The project was Claude\u2019s idea. He was a friend I\u2019d met in university, and he had already done a similar kind of installation in Provincetown, USA, with James Hansen, an artist he had met there. In the summer of that year, I went to visit him and he suggested that we redo the exercise in an apartment in Montr\u00e9al. This is how the project developed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The idea was to cover the walls and ceilings of the place, which was fairly rundown, and paint on these surfaces simultaneously, in tandem. In this way, we would blur our painterly identities and styles and create a painting that would engulf the apartment in a neo-expressionist style. Our aim was to do something experimental in a non-traditional space. This was partly out of necessity: as we were both unknown young artists and as I\u2019d never had an exhibition, it seemed an obvious solution.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Pierre Dorion<\/strong>
Peintures\/Paintings<\/em>, exhibition view, 3883, Clark Street, Montr\u00e9al, 1983.
Photo: Pierre Dorion<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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After this exhibition with Claude, I wanted to try the exercise on my own. An invitation by Marie-France Thibault, the director of Appart\u2019 Gallery, whose mandate was to present site-specific installations, gave me the possibility. On my own this time, I wanted to explore the history of painting by creating an environment that evoked the studio of a fictional artist. It therefore held many images that referenced the history of painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Later on, I was invited to make two other similar installations. Ren\u00e9 Blouin, who had been following my work since Peintures\/Paintings<\/em>, asked me to make one for Aurora borealis<\/em>, a group exhibition organized by the Centre international d\u2019art contemporain de Montr\u00e9al. He was looking to open a gallery at the time and offered to represent my work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: Can you talk about a major influence on your art practice?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Historical artists had a great impact on my early practice. The most important one is without a doubt Caspar David Friedrich, whose work I discovered when I was sixteen. At the time, I didn\u2019t know anything about this kind of painting style, which still fascinates me today. In reading a short essay on his art in a monograph, something caught my attention: he was sceptical of technical virtuosity and thought that one needs to keep a certain distance from the sumptuousness of painting. This approach affected my work and still absorbs me today.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In 2006, I saw a major exhibition of Friedrich\u2019s work at Hamburger Kunsthalle. Afterwards, this experience fed my practice considerably. His use of colour, light, and a certain melancholic mood, which has been an underlying aspect of my work from the start, has greatly influenced my painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: In March 2022, two versions of Porta Latina<\/em> hung in your studio, works that you had presented in the exhibition A Roman Anthology<\/em> at Birch Contemporary, in Toronto. One of the paintings was made in 1993, and the other in 2022. How do you explain this revival of a previous work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Pierre Dorion<\/strong>
Porta Latina<\/em>, 71 \u00d7 56 cm, 1993.
Photo: Pierre Charrier, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Pierre Dorion<\/strong>
Porta Latina (version)<\/em>, 71 \u00d7 56 cm, 2022.
Photo: Pierre Charrier, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Porta Latina<\/em> is the first painting I made based on a snapshot I took during a trip. Today, I always work in this manner\u2014that is, based on photographs mainly taken while travelling.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Remaking a painting is not uninteresting. On the rare occasion when I\u2019ve applied myself to this exercise, I worked from the original painting while also consulting the source image. The result remains faithful, therefore, to the initial composition, but there are changes in the painting\u2019s rendering because my working method has changed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It\u2019s also a work of memory that goes in various directions. It\u2019s a fascinating experience because you go back in your memory in multiple ways. I recall the experience of painting the work but also that of the place or moment in which I took the photograph.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Since Porta Latina<\/em> was the very first painting made from a picture that I had taken\u2014a laboratory painting, in a way\u2014I always thought that it would be interesting to remake it one day. When I was invited to participate in the exhibition in Toronto last summer, it gave me the opportunity to redo it. I had thought about it for over fifteen years. At the time, I tried to consider all the landscape through this photograph, which was of very poor quality. There was a superimposition of images on the negative, which meant that the image was much clearer at the top than at the bottom. I had tried to deal with this by borrowing from modern painting styles, particularly the Nabis. Thirty years later, I wanted to respect the source image more, but it was very difficult to rework it in this manner because the information was incomplete. I had to consult Google Maps, but this only complicated the situation even more.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I was curious to see the place again, which I had discovered during a trip to Rome in 1991. When I went back there last summer, I was shocked. There was a big difference between the actual place and the one represented in my paintings \u2026 The intricacies of memory, even with the help of photography, had played a trick on me!<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Artist’s studio view
Photo: William Bobby Sabourin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: What is your relationship with the studio? What is its role and significance?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: What I love about my studio is that it allows me to live and work closely in the same place. The \u201chome\u201d and \u201cwork\u201d spaces have been arranged separately, on different floors. In my first studio on Rue Atateken, the living and working spaces were on the same floor. This studio was very important for me; I learned how to paint in it \u2026 I often dreamt of that previous studio before finding my actual one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: Does it have an impact on your work?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Since I started working in this space, twenty years ago now, there\u2019s been a change in my work. This is due not only to the quality of light in the studio but also to the fact that the place was designed for me. I work in a space that inspires me to give more room in my paintings to colour and light, two aspects that I believe are and remain the basis of painting.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Artist’s studio view
Photo: William Bobby Sabourin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: In addition to your art practice, you have also been invited to carry out curatorial projects. Can you talk about the project Carte grise<\/em>, which you curated for Dazibao?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: The curatorial projects for which I\u2019ve been asked to create exhibition projects have always reflected concerns present in my work. When conceiving the project for Dazibao, I was searching for refinement, sparseness, austerity in the painterly approach to the photographic images I was using. My work focused on the erasure and formal simplification of the image. In Carte grise<\/em>, the heliographic photographs of \u00c9douard Baldus, a nineteenth-century French photographer who retouched his images a great deal, were presented alongside the urban landscapes of Robin Collyer, who erased any wording in them to obtain mysterious images that evoked minimalism, among other aspects. Guy Pellerin created monochrome paintings by isolating one colour in the photographs he took of different sites.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: Your work is connected to the intersection between photography and painting. At the same time, in the series Projet Y<\/em>, you seem to be moving away from the representation of place and using a more expressive gesture that is far from the immaculate aspect of your work. How did you come to this approach?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Completely by chance. In 2017, when I went to Projet Y, an artist residency located in a natural setting, for the first time, I brought certain materials\u2014stretchers, paper\u2014with me, but I didn\u2019t know what I was going to make with them. I was doing some shading on old wood boards, and as I was cleaning my brushes on paper, I started considering the marks that they were leaving on the surface. I\u2019d always wanted to explore gesture in my painting. So I began to make work based on this result, using the same energy but doing it mechanically without really thinking about it, probably influenced by nature\u2019s proximity.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion_Tableaux\"$
Pierre Dorion<\/strong>
Projet Y #8<\/em>, 30,48 x 25,4 cm, 2020.
Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay, courtesy of the artist
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It was a form of automatism, which loosely reminded me of paintings by certain Qu\u00e9bec artists from the 1950s. I found this curious because I was not interested in this period in my youth. With time, and in a sudden and unpredictable way, you sometimes get closer to things that didn\u2019t compel you before but now resonate with you. In fact, this is what happened when I saw Joan Mitchell\u2019s linden series in 1992. It made me see abstract painting and the gestural aspect of these works quite differently.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Curiously, when I was working at Projet Y, I didn\u2019t feel a desire to create an image or obtain a specific composition. I was more interested in the aspect of control: when I have too much control, it doesn\u2019t necessarily work, and if I completely let myself go, it can also lead to a whole lot of nothing. My work therefore comes down to creating series of small paintings in parallel with those made from photographs, which are formally very different even though they use the same colours.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: Are you afraid of repeating yourself?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: I think that we often work all our lives around a sole obsession. Although we can probe things more deeply, it\u2019s normal that there are repetitions; they just need to be worthwhile ones.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion_Tableaux\"$
Pierre Dorion<\/strong>
Projet Y #3<\/em>, 30,48 x 25,4 cm, 2020.
Photo: Richard-Max Tremblay, courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
PB<\/strong>: How do you feel after a forty-year career? What\u2019s next?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Listen, this is a good question, which I\u2019ve also pondered recently. It\u2019s not that I\u2019m in a period of questioning or wondering what I\u2019m going to do next. At the moment, I\u2019m simply happy to be able to keep going. I think that what will come next won\u2019t be drastically different from or completely counter to my current work, though I sometimes try different things, as during the residency at Projet Y. In fact, I\u2019ve been making small \u201cabstract\u201d paintings at the same time as those based on photographs for a long time. Paradoxically, I\u2019m taking pictures less and less. I\u2019ve accumulated enough images that interest me and that haven\u2019t yet been transformed into paintings.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After forty years, I must admit that I\u2019m not afraid of what the future has to offer. I often feel that I\u2019m just beginning! I imagine\u2014and hope\u2014that there will be modifications and changes. But I certainly don\u2019t see myself starting to work in acrylic, freehand, or with a new system, for example. But who knows? Maybe I\u2019ll set myself up in a new, larger studio, because at the moment, taking my paintings out of the studio always involves some gymnastics. In any case, I take a philosophical view of it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
The artist doesn\u2019t retire. Making art is not just work, it is life. My painting indirectly reflects what I am and is subtly shaped by the impact of certain episodes in my life, particularly the AIDS crisis and losing my partner at the time\u2026 Everything I have lived through and experienced has been filtered and distilled through my work in a continuous, homogeneous, and semi-static way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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$\"Pierre-Dorion\"$
Pierre Dorion in his studio
Photo: William Bobby Sabourin<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
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PB<\/strong>: What would you say to the young Pierre Dorion?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
PD<\/strong>: Without necessarily doing something different, there have been times when I could have taken more risks. But if I really think about it, I\u2019m convinced that I would do it all the same again. The priority, what matters above all, is the work, the will to create. You just have to give yourself to it, and the rest will follow. It\u2019s a very optimistic approach, but in my case, it\u2019s how it has worked. Being an artist requires a great deal of confidence in yourself, and you really have to believe in it because it\u2019s far from easy. The advice I would give young artists today is to go to the studio and work, to do their work as best as they can, and not to worry too much about what comes next.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by Oana Avasilichioaei<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n
Philippe Bourdeau, Pierre Dorion<\/div>\n
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