Gilles Séguin has a passenger waybill... and a portefolio well filled. Born in Montreal in 1936, he was in turn, draughtsman, model maker, decorator, graphic and set designer for television and also illustrator of articles and novels. He is a also a painter and for this reason, as had many exhibitions of his work. In 1974, he executes a series of inks and watercolours having for topic the lanes of Montreal some of wich appeared in Perspectives. In 1975,he acquires a farm in Saint-Fabien and exploits the 142 acres of land, and a maple section of more than 2,000 notches. He then trades the lanes of the metropolis for largely open spaces of Bas-SaintLaurent, and undertakes to explore, pencil in hand, the back roads, streets and villages.
In 1977 and 1978, a grant from the ministry of Cultural Affairs allows him, to paint the houses and farms of the Bic until SaintFrançois-Xavier-des Hauteurs from the banks of the St-Laurent river to the plateaus of the interior. He brought back from these field trips a hundred drawings, inks and watercolours which were the subject of a series of itinerant exhibitions in the cities and villages of St-Luce, St-Donat, Rimouski, Tois Pistoles, Saint-Fabien and Saint-François Xavier des Hauteurs. -I liked very much this experience, he told me. People came to see their house, those of their neighbors. They were surprised when they reconized their houses. While they were looking more closely they would underline the details and revealing the history behing each one.
The inks and watercolours of Gilles Séguin deliver a vision and a version of the houses and buildings of the South coast which would deserve to be regarded as a revealing document of the life and times of an area. They are almost photographic with such realistic pen work. The lines are fine and the use of the color is reduced to the essence. This technique, has certain affinities with those used by the Orientals, emphasizing the architectural structures of the houses and the buildings makes it possible for the eye to seize, from one sketch to the other, the similarities and evolutionary features. The artist, on the other hand, allowed himself a margin of freedom in the restitution during his work of the restitution of history. Thus, the houses almost always are considered and reproduced in an angle, seldom of frontage: in this manner they have more relief, texture and depth.
They are also represented in a winter setting which confers even more «dépouillement» in addition, the forms and the colors ofthe snow, the horizon and the sky lets one perceive the type of ambient climate and the physical framework, testifying to the relation which was established in this country between man and his milieu. One guesses a way of life , an history, a variable prosperity, a tradition, influences, building techniques which changes or which last and reveal other important details.
Finaly, Gilles Séguin voluntarily isolated the houses. Very faithful in the reconstitution of their features, he however modified their immediate surroudings. Indeed each house is presented in an empty space. This process, if it emphasizes more each house, makes more difficult the perception of the methods of integration of each one to its vicinity and is the identification within this vicinity (is it urban? it is rural?). In addition,the artist imposes with his drawings a certain restoration: it purifies them, and does not show of it all their defects, magnifies the perspective, etc. Thus emerges a rather bucolic vision of the inheritance «batît» québécois.
Normand Cazelais
