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.
Le chant de l’aube
A mural artwork by François Morelli
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.
François Morelli
“Born in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal), François Morelli earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Concordia University in 1975. From that point on, his practice has been informed by interdisciplinarity, performativity and relationality. Between 1981 and 1990, Morelli lived and worked in the greater New York area, where he completed a master’s degree at the Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University (New Jersey), in 1983. He began teaching in 1981 and retired from Concordia University in 2019 after 22 years of teaching. The recipient of numerous grants and residencies, he has performed and exhibited his work since 1977. His gallery representation has been provided in Montréal by Christiane Chassey from 1991 to 2004 and Joyce Yahouda from 2006 to 2017, by the Horodner Romley Gallery in New York from 1993 to 1995, and by Chiguer Art Contemporain in Québec City and Montréal since 2022. He was the recipient of the Prix d’excellence de la Biennale de dessin et d’estampe d’Alma in 1993 and received the Louis-Comtois Award in 2007, the Ozias-Leduc Award presented by the Fondation Émile-Nelligan in 2021, and the Paul-Émile-Borduas Award in 2024. He shares his life with art and design historian Diane Charbonneau, author and artist Didier Morelli, and art and architecture historian Arièle Dionne-Krosnick.”
This biographical notes is in quotation marks, as it is signed by the artist.
Credit: Joanie Fortin