Claude De Gaspé Alleyn: the passage of time By René Viau Translated from the French by Louise Davis We are taken on a trip down memory lane by the familiar and cherished characters brought to life by the painter Claude De Gaspé Alleyn. Even though this artist humorously dissects the perpetual daily lives of “regular” people, these individuals evoke affection rather than critical irony. Lawn Boy, for example, convenes the sacrosanct Sunday rituals of the countryside: summer cottages on a lakeshore, char-grilled meat and volleyball, the reading of the daily newspaper and a parked car blocking the view of the landscape. People pushing their lawnmowers intersect the scene. One of them is cutting out a strip of grass, carving its rectilinear form with great precision. The lawn mower marks off a rectangle that crosses the canvas and in the distance, a counterpart does the same. Creating an unexpected parallel, these bands of cut grass interact with the highly geometric form of the path left by the Sun’s reflection on the dancing flow of the lake. Alluding to the works of Signac or Seurat, the scene is executed in a divisionist or pointillist style. It is this multiplication of dots, placed by brush or stylus and accentuated by needle that forms the foundation of the picture, as if just as many pixels had been applied with the utmost artisanship. Although the world created here is a familiar one, its strange appearance is all too plain to see. It is like a certain form of magical realism. A key element of these paintings resides in this combination of playlets in the
midst of a whole that appears immobilised in the vibration from which they were born. In the same way, the artist transports us into the general store of a rural village, a theme captured in several paintings. Here a meditative dimension accompanies the humour and irony. The cans of food and varying products are lined up side by side on the shelves. Geometry is once again paired with more organic shapes. Flashlights and oil lamps find themselves together behind the counters amongst tools and objects of everyday rural life: cowboy boots, overalls, axes, shooting jackets… Here we find ourselves transported to another time period. Are we in the 50s, 60s, 70s or at a more present moment in time ? The chronological details contradict each other: the oil lamp is near the microwave oven. Products are disposed high up and line the walls from floor to ceiling. We can all but guess the familiar conversations that could be heard on this stage: sport, politics, jokes, gossip and village rumour. However, a sense of silence also prevails. Fun and nostalgia show through simultaneously. In addition to this point of interest, the same almost obsessive care used to render the painting’s myriad of elements and the joys of multiplying the visual components can be found in these logs of wood stacked up in a truck’s skip. The meandering contours of the mountains, the banks of a river and the blue line of the forest treetops weave in layers their interlaced design (Transport de bois, Hautes Laurentides). The attention to detail is astounding while the painting appears to enclose itself in tight bands that confine the composition.
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