Out to play
by Mario Cyr
Journalist, Magazine Parcours, # 14, 1994.
His flat looks like a “bric-a-brac”, a bazaar. Everywhere, on the walls, the furniture, the shelves, there are toys. He has been collecting them for years. Board games or games of skill, dolls, figurines, stuffed animals, plastic ducks, scale models.
Toys are omnipresent in his life and in his work. Look at his paintings. The characters are dolls, clowns and teddy bears. Jigsaw pieces form the sky, plastic trees form the forest and mini bricks create pillars, arches and other architectural elements. His frames, sometimes plaster casts of dolls, sometimes plastic soldiers, are an integral part of the canvas.
Claude Bibeau nevertheless deals with very serious, even heavy, themes. Death, AIDS, violence, pollution, individualism, war and loneliness. He likes the contrast that emerges from the use of the toy in a dramatic composition. Because the toy makes you smile, it amuses you. The toy de-dramatises the message, without losing its sharpness and virulence. It is "Alice in Horrorland". Apocalyptic themes and childlike aesthetics sum up Claude Bibeau's approach.
Meticulous and driven by a strong attention to detail, Claude Bibeau is self-taught. Originally from Drummondville, he became interested in drawing at an early age and has continued to do so ever since. In the early 1970s, he joined forces with artists from his region to launch the Mouvement Bonbon, a movement tinged with somewhat utopian thinking.
"The world of childhood that we were exploring seemed to us to be full of simplicity, in the spirit of the Peace and Love movement, we wanted to give a message of hope and love. Since then, I have lost my illusions. I no longer have the naivety to believe that the world can change. Stupidity, violence and hatred will continue as long as there are men. When we are all buried under the lava, petrified, like the inhabitants of Pompeii, then, yes, there will be peace on earth.
Bitter? No, just realistic. Because he lives continually immersed in a childlike universe full of fantasy, one might think that he is running away from our adult world. This is not the case. He does not try to escape reality but to show it to us in his own way.
(...) A work of great originality, striking and modern.
Photography: Michel Dubreuil
