Cynthia Girard

Addressing, among other things, in her 2005 exhibition “Fictions sylvestres / Sylvan Fictions,” the devastation of Quebec’s forest by the logging industry, artist Cynthia Girard defined the monochromatic background of 10 super-sized paintings in a brilliant blue. Flat and flawless, the colour denoted both storybook sky and the omniscient eye as eternal silent witness to earthly narratives. One canvas, Le Triangle Impossible, featured a version of the all-seeing eye framed by a triangle rendered as sawed lumber.

In her recent exhibition, “La secte de la souris volante / The Sect of the Flying Mouse” (Oboro, Montreal), the all-seeing eye was now the eye of the artist invoking the “world beyond the screen.” It’s as if Girard fixed the sky of her mind in plaster to give it the physical dimension needed for the landing of her psychic arrivals. Fresco pale blues, greys and beiges tinted the stage. This was not Baie-Comeau but the tomb of her brain where a scarab beetle had just rolled in a spider’s egg sac.

“La secte de la souris volante” was a multimedia installation of 10 paintings, five sculptures (two incorporating sound) and a mural-scale faux-fresco complete with secret entrance into the tomb of the Flying Mouse. At the opening the artist read from a chapbook of four poems of the same title (Girard’s seventh publication) evoking the extravagance of Montreal poet and playwright Claude Gauvreau. In the foreword she states, “Inside my head there is a tomb and many paintings. In the tomb there are Far-West Egyptian-style sculptures, while the paintings reflect what is in my head. My eyes are like doors, yes, my eyes are the doors of this tomb and the brain is the bound up mummy of my dead ideas.”

At the entrance of this first room were two large papiermâché rocks, spackled grey, one tall and erect, the other squat and sobbing. Disoriented by the sound and the juxtaposed images within the seven five-foot-square paintings and grand mural, I felt the urge to scurry. Back and forth from one to another, a mouse would need wings. But what first appears lunatic soon reveals the workings of a master. Girard may not have known what images she was summoning but she was in full control when painting them. Her command of pictorial and formalist strategies liberates pure delight. An array of objects—light fixtures, spider plant, insects, flowering coffin, hairy key, joints, banana crescent moon, coral, easels, castle doors—lift their colour from Gaucher to Van Gogh while quoting Pointillism, Expressionism, geometric abstraction, Surrealism, handicrafts, Minimalism and hieroglyphs. High to naïve, ancient to kitsch, all level on these flat fields. Guston’s forms come to mind but the lack of horizons and the optical antics relieve the viewer of the burden of real doom. Girard said that for this exhibition she just wanted to have fun.

Passing through the secret door and entering the tomb, I became an initiate of the Sect of the Flying Mouse. Inside, the walls were deep green. Three black and white paintings on monochromatic taupe grounds recalled Pollock’s Guardians of the Secret or Gottlieb’s pictographs. Two sculptures occupied the corners: one plaster Egyptian paintbrush and one papier-mâché coffin, from which emerged an insistent knocking. In the centre of the tomb, a pyramid-shaped fixture hanging over a sarcophagus shone light onto the mummified remains of the Flying Mouse; pale gold and delicate as a moulted exoskeleton, its features painted in the aforementioned blue. A pair of paintbrushes laid crossways over the heart, light as feathers. There was something very touching about the inflated tube of plastic lying in a crudely painted wooden crate representing eternal rest. As Girard concludes in her foreword and depicts in the painting Eye and Coffin, “I am distorted while the fly gets stuck on the tape; forever.” ■

Cynthia Girard’s “La secte de la souris volant / The Sect of the Flying Mouse” was exhibited at Oboro in Montreal from May 26 to June 23, 2007.

Virginia Dixon is a painter living in Toronto.