Hello everyone,
Our current show, the first solo at Division Gallery, presents the work of Eric Simon, who is a mid-career, Montreal-based artist, and an associate professor of fine arts at Concordia University. Last summer he showed at the Musée D’art de Joliette, and has a long history of participating in excellent exhibitions, and other art-world achievements. He’s married to another quality artist, Sonia Haberstich, who showed here in our very first exhibition, Prismatic Spray, and with whom he has two children. He is, for good reason, a respected and valued member of our community.
He’s also funny, in several ways; but I’m interested in one of those ways in particular, his sense of humor and variety as an artist. It would be easy to convince anyone, myself included, if they didn’t already know the truth, that several if not many different artists were the authors of Eric’s work. His stuff often generates actual laughs, in a generous way, without sacrificing anything in the way of ultimate seriousness and quality. And not only that, but the sheer amount of apparently unlike things he makes can be frankly bewildering to think about at first, although with a little time, patterns emerge across the blanket of his practice that begin to make sense. His technical level being very high is something which he both celebrates and deprecates visibly, sometimes in the same work; but more often by hanging things near one another that seem like contradictions. And then we realize that part of the point is to reveal the diverse ways in which speaking in the discourse of art is something like a unified form of speech.
We all know that artists are ’supposed’ to move towards increasingly unified positions in their style; and it is true that doing so helps most people, by allowing them to focus in the needed way, to improve their level of quality. In truth though, most artists will experiment from time to time, and doing so is usually helpful. Most such experiments aren’t exhibited; but there is no fundamental reason why they can’t be. And sometimes they are, bringing occasional gusts of fresh air into the art world with them. Then there is the occasional artist whose whole career is dedicated to such an ideal, and such gusts, who challenges us to confront heterodox imagery and ideas, every time. Curating such work is exhilarating, I think. Eric’s show, Au-delà du réel?, is one such case. He’s someone for whom the words ‘experimentation’ and ‘art’ are synonyms, and has put together a large and various, deeply personal world for our consideration. I find it very exciting.
