Discovering André Fournelle
André Fournelle is a multidisciplinary artist renowned for his sculptures, gallery installations, and in situ works. His research focuses on materials, their solidity, telluric force, and transmutation.

Born in 1939, André Fournelle lives in Montreal. Fascinated by molten metal, like a true alchemist interested in the four elements, he has been transforming metal, fire, coal, and neon tubes into fascinating works of art for sixty years. He collaborated with poet Claude Gauvreau and associated with Armand Vaillancourt and Marcelle Ferron. Between 1966 and 1969, he joined the group Experiment in Art and Technology, an American multidisciplinary creation laboratory directed by Robert Rauschenberg. Drawn to fusible and luminous materials, he explored industrial materials in collaboration with engineers and scientists.

In his art, André Fournelle continuously pushes boundaries, explores materials and their symbolism, and expresses a humanistic sensitivity while engaging in social and political critique. Many of his works integrating art with architecture and the environment are the result of the artist’s inexhaustible audacity and ingenuity. André Fournelle received the Paul-Émile-Borduas Prize in 2021, the highest distinction awarded to artists by the Quebec government.

Discovering Marc Garneau
For the well-known painter and accomplished engraver Marc Garneau, the surface of materials possesses qualities of internal metamorphosis. The use of fire and its traces accentuates transformations, as if combustion furthered his desire to reconfigure matter.

Born in 1956, Marc Garneau lives and works in Montreal. For forty years, he has practiced printmaking and painting. At a time when figurative art was in vogue in the 1980s, Marc Garneau created essentially abstract art firmly rooted in Quebec automatism and American abstract expressionism. His canvas forms an experimental space in which he assembles, splices, cuts, glues, and burns pieces of canvas and wood as well as found objects. Eminently physical, Marc Garneau’s art often draws on his environment, and whether he creates a work in the city or the countryside, the atmospheres inspire him differently each time, with rural landscapes becoming a source of fertility for work with fire. An alchemist of his metamorphoses, Marc Garneau is a skillful manipulator who avoids the predictable.

His art is marked by an inclination for dark tones, strong contrasts, and the unexpected. He won the Grand Prize at the Biennale of Drawing, Printmaking, and Paper Art of Quebec in 1997 and has held around sixty solo exhibitions in Quebec and Europe.