No toying with painting

What I need to tell, I shall draw for you
Forms are pleasing to me, take a good look at them.
Games, when most simple make one most happy.
Their titles ring true, their effects are magical.
Everything I enjoy rests in the line that makes up the word “Love”.
                                       

                                            Claude Bibeau (1975)

In the face of the repeated announcements of the death of painting that have marked the last quarter century, Claude Bibeau's work proclaims a spectacular resurrection and a denial of this outdated affirmation. Indeed, all of Bibeau's life and energies have served to maintain and exalt his faith in this art, in its means, in the strength of painting as a contemporary mode of expression and creation. This celebration of painting is at the same time a tribute to existence, to friendship and to sexuality, subjects that he approaches with the distance offered by this art of illusion and artifice, clandestine messenger of peace and love. The commercial and critical failure of his work is understandable in the Quebec context, even if it remains inexcusable, and it is regrettable that Claude Bibeau could not benefit from the attention that the late distribution of his work would bring to a career that was interrupted too soon. 

From his earliest works, produced in the early 1970s, Bibeau announced what would make his approach unique. The adaptation of images and forms drawn from popular culture and the world of children's games served to formulate his pictorial language, in which the imaginary served to enhance the value of painting; this manipulation also allowed him to formulate a critical commentary on the morals and values of his contemporaries. Satirical and cynical subjects, often tender and humorous, became an essential part of his art and Bibeau used this tool to attract the complicity of the viewer, in order to share his clear-sighted vision and insolent pleasure. 

Very early in his career, the reproduction of cut-out images taken from drawing boards to create toys or the elements of a set summons the imaginary capacity of simplified images and suggestive colours. The two-dimensional aspect of objects borrowed from the world of children - illustrations, colouring books, alphabet books - the overflow of shadows, the strength of trompe-l'œil, the impact of truncated compositions, the richness of the frames that extend and comment on the subject of the painting, are all ways of questioning the universe through painting. 

Pictorial representation invites the transformation and deviation of perceptions in the face of a given subject. The effectiveness of Claude Bibeau's message comes in part from his great mastery of painting and the range of his means, which he diverts to the benefit of an often anxious and anguished expression. Drawing on the resources of graphic design, advertising and current imagery, the artist relies on his skill in drawing, sometimes assisted by photography, and he puts forward the resources of the application of paint to affirm his commitment to the fictional and abstract potential of this art. At a time when minimal art and abstract expressionism were triumphing, Bibeau reaffirmed the conceptual and aesthetic power of figuration subjected to the distorting mirror of interpretation.

Jouer à être (Playing to be), a painting from 1976, proclaims the effigy of a tobacco advertisement associated with the virile image of the sailor proud of his costume, a precursor of Querelle de Brest. Disguise and disguise allow the identity substituted for camouflage to be revealed or recovered. The strange emotion that springs from Chabounadonga, a calm, devastating tomcat, is indicative of the potential of Bibeau's paintings. What one might call hyperrealism contains an emotional charge whose seduction is only the first step in the pleasure of enjoying the painting itself.

Claude Bibeau's art is inscribed in several registers of meaning in order to make us evolve in the strata of this dangerous pleasure. The pleasures of the application of the coloured line, of the gesture of painting, of the composition are added to that of the metaphor on identity, on art and on society. Bibeau's research is structured around series produced in an almost systematic way at different times in his life. Portraits of friends, self-portraits, tributes to painters, the representation of scenes of homosexual life, and above all the translation of the human comedy through the world of toys which, through a sort of psychodrama, try to understand or tame the tragedies of life, these different themes constitute the main facets of his production. 

The multiplication of self-portraits provides a narcissistic gallery that reflects so many aspects of his personality. Sometimes a flamboyant angel, sometimes a gypsy or a dog, sometimes in love and sometimes a shadow that remembers, the painter's image also freezes in the alter ego of the ideal portrait, Mona Lisa, of which he accepts to be only a mechanical reproduction. His works are full of references and quotations that refer to other images, to the pleasure of looking and understanding.

The Portrait of Peter Flinsch takes the form of an allegory of a friend who is also an artist. The painting is also a tribute to drawing and painting. The back of the painter occupies the centre of the canvas. On the left is the sketch of Flinsch's portrait, of which only the face is painted, while on the right is a drawing of Bibeau posing for Flinsch. In this pseudo-triptych, unified on the same surface, the presence of the central body confirms the artist's involvement in the painting. The artist absorbs himself in it, penetrates it in order to be able to fully play with its evocative power and thus attempt to confuse reality and art in the process of being made. 

One of the important aspects of this creation is presented as a praise of painting. Through direct or indirect tributes, Bibeau honours the pantheon of his predecessors, who thus form a gallery of heroes. Bibeau prefers the painter-drawers and surrealist artists and affectionately pastiche Raphael, Ingres, Géricault, Modigliani, Magritte and Lemieux. Star paintings become the object of a derisory reinterpretation thanks to a staging of dolls, such as Parade where it seems possible to reread Géricault's Le Radeau de la Méduse, or by the puzzle game that takes the form of the monochrome Minimal rouge.

Several tributes are less direct, such as the allusion to the tradition of Renaissance history painting in Sébastien, or the allusion to academic painters in the falsely literal Hommage aux pompiers. The reference to Watteau's Gilles in Figure de tragédie is undoubtedly one of the peaks of this association between the world of toys and that of painting. The distress of the stalked, anguished and solitary figure of the teddy bear echoes what the eighteenth-century painter wanted to capture in the isolated character of the Commedia dell'arte, who must always find in the springs of his soul the means to distract the audience.  

Camouflaged self-representation, respectful derision, truthful mirage, Claude Bibeau's pictorial strategies and his involvement with his art are too important for us to remain insensitive to them. Bibeau makes the game of life the stake of his painting.

It is up to us to take the risk.

Montréal, 2000.