''Le chant de l’aube'', A Mural Presented by the MAC
FreeUntil January 10, head to Galerie PVM to discover Le chant de l’aube, a mural artwork by François Morelli. This mural presents a facsimile of a suite of drawings made by Montréal artist François Morelli during the lockdown. A mature work, Le chant de l’aube intimately offers an ambitious cartography of the artistic means used in his drawing practice, a cornerstone of his multidisciplinary body of work.
About the Mural
Morelli revisits the use of motifs made with rubber stamps, which emerge from his longtime interest in ornamentation, conceptual art, and relational art practices. The atomized ink and stencils form a loosely rhythmical and quasi-floating space, while freehand drawings, taken from the artist’s sketchbooks, convoke figures and forms recalling his performances and sculptures as well as an autobiographical stream of free association.
Adopting a serial format partially inspired by Assyrian bas-reliefs, Mesoamerican codices, and the tradition of Asian painted scrolls, Le chant de l’aube unfolds like a long, oneiric flatbed¹. The main themes of Morelli’s work appear one by one, starting with the omnipresent body whose gestures take on a symbolic language.
What this language tells us about relationships between individuals and how they relate to objects and the surrounding world eludes any direct reading and instead develops a mental space that is, in a sense, the opposite of the specific places explored by Morelli. The sociocultural and political references specific to his projects are here further incorporated into an ample and poetical meditation, in which the idea of metamorphosis opens onto a polyphonic understanding of togetherness and the passage of time.
¹ A concept established by American art critic Leo Steinberg in 1972 to describe a horizontal work surface.