“A ciel ouvert: Le Nouveau pleinairisme”

What exactly do the words plein air conjure these days? In the 19th century, the term described the discipline (or perhaps, more accurately, the lack thereof) of spontaneous open air painting in nature—as practised by Corot, Cézanne and even, later, our dear old Group of Seven. Revelling in transitory light effects and in the freedoms that nature affords were key. But, as I descended through the clouds into Quebec City—airborne on my way to see curator Kitty Scott’s exhibition “À ciel ouvert: Le nouveau pleinairisme” at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec—I had to reflect: in the 21st century, the air is rather more plein than we might like, filled up with air traffic, industrial particulate, digital telecommunications signals, sound pollution, solar radiation flares and weather systems that hint at global-warming apocalypse. Can we still look up and find transcendence? Can contemporary art restore us to such traditional epiphanies?

This superb little show provided some answers, examining a tradition that still survives, albeit in a somewhat vestigial state. From the watercolour sketches and full-blown canvases of Canadian painter Peter Doig (whose paintings capture the light, wind and sky of Trinidad in shout-out Matissean blues), to the endearingly earnest landscape paintings made in upstate New York by Icelandic performance artist Ragnar Kjartansson (warmly mock-romantic efforts), or Irene Kopelman’s beautiful and spare drawings of shadows and ice forms in the Arctic, the show takes us from the sublime to the ridiculous, and sometimes—as in Peter Fischli and David Weiss’s absurd expedition as a costumed rat and bear afoot in the Swiss Alps—both at the same time.

Scott presented her show with a curatorial apéritif, which one encountered at the threshold of the exhibition proper: a sampler of historical paintings and photographs chosen by Montreal painter Pierre Dorion from the museum’s collection. This selection set the frame for perception, prompting rumination on the subtly different aims of plein air in Europe and North America. Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s Un beau soir, souvenir d’Italie, 1872–73, dominated the arrangement, a leafy, lakeside idyll that speaks of relief from the hectic jive of urban life and the salons of Paris, which were gearing up in that early modern moment. But the oil sketch by Cornelius Kreighoff, a transplanted European at work in Quebec and far removed from his natural habitat, expressed a different relationship to nature, recording his fascination with the New World and its (to him) exotic indigenous inhabitants. Scantily clad aboriginal people are seen spear fishing at night on a darkened river; only their fiery torches illuminate the scene, and barely. (Interestingly, in Krieghoff’s later studio versions of the same subject, these inscrutable shadows are filled in with discernible local flora and fauna, as he pictorially tames the unknown.) A suite of photographs by Quebec-born artist Jules-Ernest Livernois installed nearby, picture late 19th-century life on the banks of the St. Lawrence. One records a scene of jagged upward-heaving ice formations rearing ominously at the edge of town (a building can be glimpsed in the background), suggesting how human settlement and untamed nature coexisted in uncomfortably tight proximity. Winter is the wolf at the door, but a gang of workers sits around on the floes, shooting the breeze. The arctic scenes of the German romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich come to mind (it’s those ice shards), but here the brutal demarcation between man and nature is almost comical in its abruptness. Rather than being a cathedral of sublimity, nature is a workplace, and a gnarly one at that.

The ghost of Friedrich hovers, too, over Fischli and Weiss’s The Right Way, 1983, a 50-minute document of the Swiss artists clad in their bear and rat costumes making their dramatic alpine trek from valley to peak—grumbling, commiserating, bickering and colluding all the way. Together the pair brave surging rapids, share a freshly roasted piglet over an open fire and traverse perilous glacial crevasses. Finally, they set up camp on a cliff edge, perched high above cloud level, making music together against a heavenly backdrop of mountain peaks and darkening sky. Hilarity suddenly makes way for profundity: loving and fighting, hoping and despairing, striving and resting and then pushing on—the work explores some fundamental conditions of our passage between life and death beneath an infinite, indifferent sky. The Right Way leaves us pleasurably stranded in tender poignancy. Fellowship is all.

Scott included a few Canadian classics in the mix, like Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s projection Night Canoeing, 2004, which delivers a sense of Canadian nature brimming with potential menace. The couple filmed the lake edge from the vantage point of their slow-moving canoe, their flashlight beam sweeping the dark shoreline with its abandoned cottage fronts, semi-decomposing fallen timbers and water lillies. It’s a long way from Giverny to these brooding slow pans, which look more like preambles to a horror film than evidence of repose in nature. Montrealer Michel de Broin presented Cut in the Dark, 2010, in which a bare-chested urban logger fells a street lamp with a chain saw in a city parking lot at night. Modalities of forest and city conflate. And Geneviève Cadieux’s paired photo-panoramas of islands in the St. Lawrence (2004–05) reveal the dramatic seasonal contrasts of that region, from the bleak landscape-on-chemo light of midwinter to the deep blue-on-gold days of summer. No one craves nature’s longer days and luminous skies more than those who must endure its deepest winters.

One of the lovelier galleries in this exhibition was shared by the British painter Silke Otto-Knapp and Inuit artist Mark Igloliorte, both of whom paint in a subdued palette of misty greys, evoking light remembered. Igloliorte’s series of 2008, painted on Plexiglas, summon early photographic lantern images taken by 19th-century Arctic explorers, the archival images corroded and smeared in his retelling to ghostly effect. At times we can barely make out the figures of the Inuit ancestors who seem to emerge from a blizzard of historical time.

Otto-Knapp, though, alludes to a different past, recalling the romantic tradition of European Grand Tour in her moonlit mountainscapes. Painter (Marianne North), 2011, depicts the British woman explorer and amateur horticulturalist seated at her easel in a tropical jungle, her personage all but fused with her surroundings. It’s what we seek in the open air: to merge with nature, to lose that boundary between us and it. Times may change, but this well-crafted exhibition shows us how that experience never goes out of style. ❚

“À ciel ouvert: Le nouveau pleinairisme” was exhibited at the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, Quebec City, from March 15 to June 25, 2012.

Sarah Milroy is a Toronto-based writer.