When a City Dreams - The Painting of Anne-Laure Djaballah - abridged version - 2019.

Anne-Laure Djaballah

When a City Dreams...

A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Anne-Laure Djaballah - When a City Dreams... ISBN Published in 2013 by LIfeworld E-Publications 72 Ellsworth Avenue Toronto - Ontario - M6G 2K3 e-mail:

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A Project Lifeworld E-Publication - 2019 Project Management and Design : Pierre Ouellet

Anne-Laure Djaballah MontrĂŠal Studio 2012

When a City Dreams...

Texts by Pierre Ouellet

Photography Pierre Ouellet

With an Introduction by Pierre Ouellet

Introduction I was skimming the art section of the Globe and Mail one Saturday morning in the fall of 2011 when I came across an article/review by R.M Vaughn about an exhibition at the Muse Gallery in Toronto. What struck me first were the two works of art on prominent display, at the center of the article, because without reading a line of text I immediately knew they were somehow from and about Montréal. This struck me because my own research at the time into “the Image of the City in early modern Canadian Poetry” was broadening in order to examine other representations of the early modern city in other media, most notably, painting and music.

As I read the obligatory review, with its measure of self-indulgence (did I really need a prominent reference to Fraggle Rock to frame the critical discussion?), its half-hearted attempt at aesthetic analysis (drawn primarily from the artist’s own statement) and the obligatory endorsement which suggested that Anne-Laure’s works were “fresh real estate” for the discerning collector (no wonder art critics are so despised by the constituents they serve), I decided nevertheless to take in the show as soon as I could.

Early the next week, I spent some time at Muse Gallery and felt immediately connected to the works, in terms of their energy and what I would later come to think of as a sense of memory prior to meaning: the mostly uncategorized déjà-vu of fleeting images and impressions that constitutes my greater sense of Montréal.

Muse owners, Lisa and Jay, were kind enough to give me an email for Anne-Laure and I tried, over the next several months, to set up a meeting with the artist.

This took several months and when we finally sat together in a small coffee shop in the shadow of the Jacques Cartier bridge near her studio, I was initially unable to overcome her natural reluctance to appear on film and share her story. It took the better part of another year, and a show at the Ossington Gallery in Toronto, before Anne-Laure agreed to share her thoughts and her work with the world in the film When a City Dreams.

To this day, I am still blown away by the work, (as I hope you will also be) and by the limitless potential of the artist’s inner vision and creative intuition, her uncanny sense of being in the genius loci of the imaginary order of collective life.

Pierre Ouellet - 2016

Introduction…………………………………...

Table of Content……………………………...

Chronology of Works.....................................

Nest Vancouver……………………….............

Other Early Works..........................................

The Gladstone Hotel - Toronto ……………..

Ossington Gallery I……………………………

Muse I …………………………………………

When a City Dreams ………………………....

Installations …………………………………...

Muse II..............................................................

Notebooks and Drawings...............................

Painting & the Imageof the Modern City.......

5-6 7 8-9 11-20 21-24 25-30 31-37 38-47 48-63 64-70 71-80 81-90 91-103

Chronology of Works The Nest Show 2003

The Gladstone Hotel 2004

The Ossington Gallery 2005

Muse Gallery I 2008

When a City Dreams 2003 - 2015

Installations 2010 - 2012

Muse II 2011

Notebooks and drawings

The Painter & the Image of the Modern City

The term “image” refers to a structure of the discourse which is about an object and a relatively well defined group of phenomena. The “image” of the city is not the gestalt of states of consciousness; it is a “distinctive speech. ... It is portrait, figure, model, according to the level of abstraction, of schematization, that one takes into account.... The image of the city is similar to a myth or a literary work. The Image is not the simple expression of a simple signifier, direct, pure, one might say, it is a sign which itself is composed of signifiers and signifieds.

Raymond Ledrut, 1973. Les images de la ville

Nest Vancouver

2003

Nest 1

Nest 1b

The nest show was the first show where I sold some of the work and what impressed me most I think was that those who bought pieces were mostly students who had very little money - I even had a few people who wanted to pay me in installments, for example.

It meant a lot to me that people who didn’t have money still wanted to buy my work and that for a lot of them, it was probably the first painting that they bought .

A-L

Nest 17

This sort of mirrored my own way of moving-at the time I’d move at least once a year so I was changing houses or apartments - each time you move you have these plans and you try to set up in a certain way - the idea of home and how you create that and if it doesn’t work out for whatever reason - you do it again and again and again... A-L

Gladstone Hotel

2005

Construction Progress

One year later - I did another show during the Queen West weekend. This time, it was in the Gladstone Hotel because I didn’t want to repeat the previous year’s experience of being outside in a tent. I now had walls on which to hang the paintings along with some of the boxes I had brought with me.

As I was setting up, I realized that by putting a few nails in the walls I could extend the painting beyond the picture frame - connecting bigger things with smaller objects – and that was a good experience.

A-L

Little Guy

A Box of Tangles

Wall 2

After a show I come back to my real life and my studio and I have a new canvas and I ask myself “what am I going to do on this canvas?

Because with every new canvas I want something new - to see something that I’ve never seen before - I want to try something different and see how I can make it work So, I am always faced with the same thing - a blank canvas and asking myself, how do I do this?

A-L

Ossington Gallery

2007

Bernice

Blue

Muse Gallery I

2008

Blankets

Adjusting

I had started collecting pictures and cutting out these photographs of houses where the roofs had caved in and in general - with all the snow - the photographs would become flattened - the white of the snow would flatten the images and remove a sense of depth - as if the snow almost acted like a canvas or paper and the lines whether trees or structures - power lines or fences looked more like drawings than photographic images.

A-L

Beneath a Simple Statement

Rebuilding

When a City Dreams...

2003 - 2014

The way that the city has influenced my work has been written about by several people – it is something that’s been there from early on – the lines - the boxes and the squares are some of the formal elements that echo the urban lines and textures around me. I grew up in the east part of Montreal where the industrial landscape -the oil refineries and the port by the water – became an integral part of my visual sensibility – Cities are both about order and chaos – they exist on a grid but are also uncontrollable - there are structures that contain but there is also a human element that escapes the box – there’s movement everywhere and it can be beautiful

Echapper aux habitudes

Defaire et refaire

A Venir

Foundation

Nest 3

Appartment MontrĂŠal

Upstairs Neighbour

Vancouver

Installations

2010-2012

Installation - Ossington Gallery - 2012

If something is done in the moment - it still comes from a lot of other stuff -memory-experience- that enables you to do that one gesture perfectly when you do it ... so if its possible to give the impression of spontaneity when in reality it took a lot of time to do something - to arrive at a gesture - three lines - which look simple when really they aren’t.

The smaller paintings are really part of how I work things out because I am seeing the whole thing right there and I can do so many of them in a short period of time... and I can do a lot in a few gestures .. and if they are not working out I can set them aside for a few months... ... maybe hang them on the wall of the studio-and someday I’ll look at one of them say that’s what I’m missing and then I feel that sense of relief

A-L

Muse Gallery II

2009

Somewhere

Ready for Hibernation

Travelling Lines

What’s underneath

Overview

I am really not an abstract expressionist… I don’t feel that my painting is about expressing my feelings - I mean it happens that the work will mirror something inside me or about me… more and more I am drawn to and interested in how the surrounding context might influence the work or find itself in the painting… and I filter that and there is always my trace almost like a handwriting… I feel that visually everything around me is so rich and so I respond to that - and depending on what I paint I begin to notice things differently and there is this back-and-forth between the work and the world

Rest

Notebooks

2003-14

And so I had these books in which I would collage notes and papers and things that I wanted to keep ‌ instead of having them all over the place - I would stick them in one book - then I would start drawing in it and painting and it and so it got really thick with all the layers and I was really surprised at how other people were curious to see the inside of these books and they really enjoyed them - I always thought of these as deeply personal - just for me - and I couldn’t see how or what significance these might have for someone else... this led me to realize that the stuff that seems most significant to me in a personal way could also have significance for someone else - even if I didn’t have to explain it or justify it to them in any way. They would somehow decipher their own meaning in it. And so, with this show I tried to take a more personal approach that works. A-L