Pierre Dorion

In English, we have nothing as perfectly expressive as the French word frisson—Pierre Dorion will appreciate this, I think—which certainly describes what I felt in the museum exhibition halls where his paintings—some 70, all told—were hung. Think of Philippians 2:12 (King James Version): “Wherefore, my beloved, as ye have always obeyed, not as in my presence only, but now much more in my absence, work out your own salvation with fear and trembling.” Well, the paintings in this show effortlessly induced the same response. Within the limits of this paradox, Dorion’s work staked its lasting auratic claim.

Indeed, as I walked through and worked through the paintings—“working through” ultimately signifying here, as in Maurice Blanchot’s words “to keep watch over absent meaning”—the truly remarkable thing was just how expressive otherwise mute representational details and abstract fields were. Unexpectedly, around each and every corner, there was something like rapture to be had, and in full measure.

The rapture had to do with a mood that the paintings provoked. Of course, the frisson here was experiential but also, and perhaps more importantly, purely liminal. I mean, it was as though, as viewer, I was arriving at an undefined mental boundary where the paintings were talking and I was trying to apprehend an inexpressible concept for which there are no words.

Pierre Dorion’s work brings such a response, perhaps, because it is haunted by so many things—a pervasive sense of erotic melancholy, the ghosts of Peter Klasen and Caspar David Friedrich and that late modernist icon, the monochrome. Yet, haunted as it may be by so much, Dorion’s corpus is uniquely his own, and very moving, albeit in the unlikeliest of ways. Although I have seen and appreciated his work for a number of years, and been convinced by its virtuosity, here, I was compelled to register its genius.

At once starting point and point of fulcrum, the reconstruction of “Chambres avec vue,” an exhibition mounted by the artist in 1999 in a vacant apartment in the Dauphins sur le Parc building (situated across from Parc La Fontaine in Montreal), also sounded a grace note. The installation of those works was reproduced here, in the halls of the Musée, with great fidelity and care. Chambres is the pivot-point for a corpus that progressively winnowed out all material excess, one in which everything gratuitous was cropped, while remaining expressive in an uncommon and replete way.

Still working from photographic records of places visited, Dorion now valorized the detail, making it the punctum. The line elides between the architectural and the abstract, conflating emotion and the numinous. The two new polyptychs created in 2012 specially for this exhibition—Gate (The Piers) and Sans titre (DB)—demonstrate this quite clearly. Indeed, after leaving the museum, I had the impression of having left the largest, most cogent and cohesive environmental volume experienced in recent memory.

The light that slowly emanates from these paintings is laden with a pervasive sadness, frozen, or in the process of freezing before our eyes; here was a sense of mourning not acute but somehow superliminal. Ineluctably, it shadows our experi-ence of paintings in which no shadows as such are seen.

A Claude Tousignant red monochrome appears here but is a ghost of its former self, as that painter’s preoccupation with birthing autonomous objects with no relationship to the external is radically inverted. Dorion eschews mute objects, invests his with light, ambiguity, aura, a semblance of life, however tenuous (which in no way obviates or belittles his obvious reverence for the Plasticien master).

Dorion’s work invites you in, never ejects or shuts you out. He does not foist the painting qua object upon you—he has always already factored you in as subject. He conjures a perfect threshold that every viewer must cross in trust. Similarly, in another way, the weird echoes of Peter Klasen are only sounded in the chosen architectural details and hardware leitmotifs of paintings like Telephone and Vestibule (Chambres avec vues)—and, of course, the integration of photography as resolute touchstone in the painter’s process. Michael Merrill is surely a fellow traveller in this regard, as well.

It is tempting to see the gradual move towards total—and never totalizing—abstraction in Dorion’s work (witness the chronological treatment here) as purely teleological. But that would altogether miss the central point of his work, which is wed at the hip to neither the representational nor the abstract, but towards the full gamut of the wholly human, and finding a zone of accommodation for the viewer’s full experience of the work as auratic touchstone.

If, as some commentators have argued, the unmade bed at the heart of Chambres avec vues is Dorion’s own, empty now, might it not also represent a soliloquy for the fraught presence of utopian signifiers, and a simultaneous recognition of human absence? Could this oblique reference be the legions of dead brought on by AIDS, and Dorion reflecting now, with courage and grace, on his own history as a gay man?

German theologian Rudolf Otto began his seminal book The Idea of the Holy by arguing that the non-rational in religion must be given its due, and then proceeded to focus on his seminal notion of the numinous. Otto characterized the numinous as synonymous with the holy (i.e., God) but minus its moral and rational aspects. I am quite sure that Dorion the person and the painter would reject such references—and yet there is perhaps a kernel of truth here.

Dorion’s paintings certainly elicit an experience that can be likened to a sepulchral night tide, endlessly resonant, and endlessly engulfing. Otto summed it all up in the eloquent Latin phrase mysterium tremendum. He defined the tremendum component as follows: awfulness (inspiring awe, or a sort of profound unease), overpoweringness (that which, among other things, inspires a feeling of humility), energy (creating an impression of immense vigour). Well, here we have the nitty gritty of Dorion’s paintings.

The mysterium possesses both the numinous experienced as wholly other—totally outside our normal experience—and the element of fascination, which causes the subject of the experience to be caught up in it, and rapturous. As Dorion has himself said: “The feeling is of interiority, not loneliness.” How strange it is that he invests both representational and abstract paintings alike with vestiges of the mysterium tremendum.

To come full circle, an inventory of the frisson I experienced here, and have felt only infrequently in a lifetime of looking at art: an exhibition of Odilon Redon’s noirs, Ad Reinhardt’s luminously dark paintings at the Museum of Modern Art, NYC, 1991, the nail fetishes (front and back) in the collection of Arman exhibited at the Museum for African Art, New York City, 1997, which has haunted me henceforth, and the spellbinding and harrowing works of Rogier van der Weyden, 1399 or 1400, in an exhibition in 1964. ❚

Pierre Dorion was exhibited at Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, from October 4, 2012 to January 6, 2013.

James D Campbell is a writer and curator living in Montreal who contributes regularly to Border Crossings.