Le tunnel Fleuri

2013
BAUDOIN WART

This poster was part of the exhibition L’art dans la rue (Winter 2021). The project aims to culturally enrich and revitalize neighbourhoods, and develop local culture, while also giving more visibility to our artists, exploring various artistic approaches and disciplines. 

In the Winter of 2021, these posters were exhibited in the streets of Montréal · Tiohtià:ke on Publicité Sauvage’s palisades.

Born in 1960 in Coteau-du-Lac, Montérégie, Baudoin Wart lives and works in Montréal. A multidisciplinary artist, his art is driven by instinct and unbridled energy. Painting is a way for him to connect to what is most visceral, obscure or impenetrable within.

In the early 80s, as he was entering his twenties, Baudoin Wart felt a sense of urgency to shake up established ways and to transform what he saw as insipid, stagnant and morose. He had a vision of "disrupting" Montréal's grey and tidy urban landscape, but in a constructive, generative way.

Conspiring with the cultural and artistic world, which spontaneously called on his services as a singularly efficient and conscientious poster artist, and aware of the financial precariousness of that community, Baudoin Wart created his own cultural urban posting company in 1987. Since then, PUBLICITÉ SAUVAGE has continued to add colour and movement to our city's vision.

This painter and entrepreneur has never abandoned his painting as a way "to make a living." It's also an essential way for him to encounter the invisible, a way of connecting to psychic immateriality and to access what is the most mysterious and impenetrable part of himself. Wart's work is introspective, both playful and perilous, and finds itself plastered on any blank surface (paper or canvas) as if it were a field of investigation into the subconscious in which the self dies only to be born again. (B.W.)

Like automatic writing, brushes, pencils and spatulas become instruments for sudden inspiration. These flashes of revelation produce shapes, textures and colours that often detach themselves from their descriptive, representational purpose. As with the Fauvist painters, this separation of conventional colours from their usual representational and realistic role accentuates the pure expression of an unaltered unconscious, free and unbound.

Wart's spontaneously organized work transforms the act of creation into new life. These illuminations generating shapes, textures and vibrant colours rely less on concrete depictions and more on the symbolic, magical, and impulsive expression of intangible impressions. Wart's paintings reflect the unclassifiable, even "undisciplined" path of this artist for whom constancy is essentially renewal.

Text: Céline Mayrand

Poster dimensions: 24 × 36”. Paper: matte, 189 g/m², acid-free.
Delivery delay in Canada: 6-9 days