2023 | SIMON BERTRAND
THE SHORE
MONTRÉAL
May 18 - June 30, 2023 

“Sometimes the mountain is hidden from me in veils of cloud, sometimes I am hidden from the mountain in veils of inattention, apathy, fatigue, when I forget or refuse to go down to the shore or a few yards up the road, on a clear day, to reconfirm that witnessing presence.”

This poem by Denise Levertov, entitled ‘Witness,’ is at the heart of the series of works exhibited, The Shore.

Since January 2022, major changes have taken place, life has been calling for a renewal; it was found, finally, in the studio. A profound fatigue born of these upheavals has enjoined a “tabula rasa.” Yet, nothing seems to lift the veil that shields one from themselves. Everything must be created anew.

Here in this space there are only fields of pastel, paper, this fatigue and Levertov’s poem. Myself revealed. How can we cross over to that shore or reach the end of that road? By seeking to create a pictorial space where the release of unconscious energies is free to occur, in a realm outside of language altogether? I have poured everything that I have onto these large lengths of paper. What you see is what dwells in the body in the aftermath of devastation.

I am now without words, both literally and figuratively. Speechless. On landscapes of paper where once strings of words could be found, an abundance of lines nervously scrawled rest in silence. This hand of mine that onetime incessantly traced and retraced, now, with the same sense of compulsion, engraves the pastel’s surface. Furrows that become artefacts of the route the hand has travelled; lines that speak no words or, perhaps, a cryptic language after all. These engravings are like an earthquake rising up from the depths below.

Once the surfaces are taken over by these meanderings, the fatigue makes way for awakening. On these sheets of paper, one finds a shore. One finds a presence.

-Simon Bertrand, May 2023