{"id":42266,"date":"2022-10-25T16:04:04","date_gmt":"2022-10-25T16:04:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/?p=42266"},"modified":"2022-10-25T16:04:46","modified_gmt":"2022-10-25T16:04:46","slug":"marc-chatelle-curator-of-our-collective-memory","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/marc-chatelle-curator-of-our-collective-memory\/","title":{"rendered":"MARC CHATELLE : Curator of our collective memory."},"content":{"rendered":"

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Marc Chatelle and our collective memory.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Over the years, my perception of art and the role of the artist has obviously evolved.<\/p>\n

As a young artist, barely out of school, I saw art as, above all, a way to break conventions, to disturb and to stand out from other people.<\/p>\n

Later, I realized that one could use art to make people think without shocking and changing perceptions without being iconoclastic.<\/p>\n

Several years ago, I finally realized that everyone did not need to see art as a way to change their life or the world and that, for many art lovers, beauty and emotions were much more important than intellectual concerns.<\/p>\n

I learned that art is not a one-dimensional reality but a multi-faceted entity and that, at the end of the day, everyone had their reasons to love art and understand it at various levels that were just as defensible one than the other.<\/p>\n

Marc Chatelle is one of those artists who is able to open the drawer of our collective memory and awaken memories that we thought were asleep forever.<\/p>\n

A largely self-thaught painter without pretensions of fame, Marc Chatelle was born in 1935 in Cuels, near Saint-Tropez, France. He arrives in Montreal at twenty.<\/p>\n

Journalist by profession, he worked for some of Quebec major weekly newspapers and went on to manage several: La Patrie, le Petit Journal, Point de Mire, le Samedi, etc. In 1980, he found himself at the helm of \u00c9chos Vedettes, where he worked for seventeen years.<\/p>\n

Retiring at sixty-two, Marc Chatelle,  is offered a box of colors. It\u2019s the beginning of a new career!<\/p>\n

Deeply rooted in Quebec\u2019s popular  history, its institutions and its celebrities \u2013 which the artist rubbed shoulders with \u2013 Marc Chatelle\u2019s work brings the viewer back to a bygone era that is still well alive in the memory of those who lived it.<\/p>\n

The reactions elicited by Chatelle\u2019s painting are therefore, as I wrote above, purely in the realm of emotion, and I challenge anyone who has lived in Quebec from the 1950s, 60s and 70s to remain cold in front of a snapshot of a grocery store where posters, ads and other relics of our past project us to a time that we would like to believe not so far away.<\/p>\n

Just as striking by the memories it provokes, his \u201cCr\u00e8che des Pays d\u2019en haut\u201d mixes characters from the famous TV show \u201cLes belles histoires des pays d\u2019en haut\u201d with other Quebec icons such as Maurice Richard, F\u00e9lix Leclerc or Marguerite d\u2019Youville as well as other symbols representative of our culture and history. It should be noted that this painting is now in the Saint Joseph\u2019s Oratory Museum where it sits within the traditional Nativity exhibition.<\/p>\n

The work of Marc Chatelle will never be part of the local or international artistic heritage \u2013 it is not his mission.<\/p>\n

Chatelle is more of a documentarian of history \u2013 big and small \u2013 and a curator of Quebec\u2019s collective memory.<\/p>\n

To me, it\u2019s more than enough to make him an important artist and amply justify his place in art galleries and prestigious collections here and elsewhere.<\/p>\n

S.M.Pearson<\/em><\/p>\n

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  Marc Chatelle and our collective memory. Over the years, my perception of art and …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":40647,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-42266","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42266","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=42266"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42266\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":42270,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/42266\/revisions\/42270"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/40647"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=42266"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=42266"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/balcondart.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=42266"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}