February 18 - March 24, 2012
SEAN MONTGOMERY, IMMORTAL ARTIST by Eric Simon
In May 2009, Sean Montgomery and myself flew to Göteborg Sweden to give a conference in English and Swedish about the work of contemporary artists. The anxiety that we felt could be explained by two reasons: first, the artists that we were going to talk about didn't exist, second, and most important, neither I nor Sean spoke or understood Swedish.
Having composed before our departure some short texts in English about artists we had invented and a fictitious body of work and biography, we used an online translator to get the Swedish version that we would read once there. We had spent close to an hour polishing up our Swedish accent with a young Icelandic artist, Kristin Eiriksdottir, that shared with us secrets of the tonal accents characteristic of Nordic languages. Enlightened with this newly acquired knowledge, we felt ready to confront the Swedish public. The conference went really well notwithstanding the inevitable boos and insults characteristic of these circumstances. Later at the Bar in the company of members of the audience from the conference, one of them, a few decades older shared the fact that he had been quite impressed with Sean's Swedish accent and that he strangely reminded him of his grand-father that had died in the forties. Sean, who was listening discretely from a distance came closer to us to explain that this coincidence could be explained by the fact that his English Canadian accent - he grew up in Edmonton- combined with the Icelandic accent he had picked up from our teacher could only lend incongruous sonorities. Then he ordered another round and we talked about something else. I thought I detected in his eyes a little mistrust that thankfully dissipated rapidly with the arrival of the next round of drinks.
Coming out of the the bar late into the night, a very old lady whose presence in the street at this late hour surprised me, came up to us and asked Sean in Swedish : « Ivar, detta är dig? Du är inkomster? Hur är detta möjligt? ». (it’s now possible for me to reproduce approximately those words because they were recorded on the answering machine. Because while I was going back to the Hotel, I was trying to leave a message on my own machine with my cell phone.). We didn’t really make anything of it and continued our way. Although I had noticed a certain discomfort in my young travelling companion.
Having planned to stay a few days in Göteborg, a visit to the Konstmusem seemed to us like a must. From that visit I have vague recollections of touring galleries with dark moldings, very high ceilings and with very few other spectators roaming in silence, careful not to disturb the other visitors. But the more our visit unraveled the more I sensed Sean’s anxiety grow. He was becoming more nervous and some drops of perspiration were visible on his forehead and his speech was becoming faster as his voice was getting higher. Something was happening that I couldn’t quite gage. Sean was walking more slowly, feigning fatigue, he was kneeling down to lace his shoe, kept asking to interrupt the visit claiming the weather outside was too beautiful. ‘Why stay inside when the weather is so nice? Why not go to the beach?’’ I became impatient, pleaded with him to leave and let me finish my visit in peace. He recomposed himself and we continued the visit in silence until we landed in a darker lit room slightly out of the way, where were grouped it seemed to me, the works of some of the artists ‘maudits’ of Sweden.
As we were wandering with no real purpose, Sean was drawn by an uncontrolable impulse towards a painting. When I joined him, I realized it was an autoportrait of Ivar Arosenius painted in 1908.
Nervously he jumped when I approached him and I then realized how emotional he was. The resemblance between Sean and Arosenius hit me
like a ton of bricks. When I mentioned it to him, he gave a nervous laugh but was obviously disturbed by my observation. As I continued to contemplate the painting admiring the quality of the work he asked me "what would an artist of this caliber be painting today?"
Then he mumbled some words that I have since forgotten, but by all accounts, my comment had shaken him up. As I continued to notice the resemblance to Sean and had mentioned this Arovenus-"Arosenius, Ivar Arosenius" he corrected me, Ok this Arosenius was a relatively unknown painter, Sean's face dropped. A conversation then ensued as we were alone in the small room.
-What a find ! How come I've never heard of him?
-You think so?
-Facinating! And the resemblance!
-You think so? Really?
-Yes, it's uncanny! You don't see it?
-Well, yeah, maybe the hair cut. He smiles nervously.
-I'll take your photo. In front of the painting.
-I don't know. It's not allowed!
-No one can see us.
-But there are cameras everywhere.
-I'll use my phone, it's discreet. No one will notice.
Back in Montreal, I put the photo taken from the Konstmuseum on the wall of my office. A few days later, Sean came in and got really mad when he saw the image. He ordered me to take it down and destroy it. Without a word I obeyed, he then calmed down and started to talk about this and that. I hadn't really noticed until then his strange reaction which in fact, he had during most of our Swedish trip, so I started to do some research.
I found out that Ivar Arosenius along with his career as a painter, was a writer and illustrator. He had written a well known book, 'Kattresan (the voyage of a cat)' published shortly after his death. Also Kattresan had printed more than 20 editions, and was translated in several languages (Norwegian, Finnish, Japanese) Ivar Axel Henrik Arosenius (born October 8, 1878 in Göteborg: died January 2nd 1909 in Älvängen from a hemmorage) with no living relatives. After finishing school Arosenius went to Munich then Paris where he discovered the art of his times. Many of his pencil sketches attest to the strong influence the important works that he discovered had had on him. When he returned to Sweden his work was influenced by the latest Swedish styles, a form of national Romanticism and a taste for fairy tales and popular legends.
His delicate watercolours reveal the artists heightened sensitivity and interest in a form of delusional mysticism. During that short peroid, Arosenius painted daily numerous scenes where motifs from fairytales are combined with everyday reality. As his world shrank, Arosenius closed himself off from the outside world and was finding his models more and more exclusively from his close entourage. His wife and his daughter as well as a few rare acquaintances would share with fairies the universe of his paintings. A series of selfportraits through which the artist clearly questions his own existence complete the whole of his oeuvre. Arosenius is only thirty-one years old when he dies and is buried at the Östra Kyrkogården Cemetary in Götenborg.
But this is where the story gets complicated, because according to our research, it seems that Ivar Arosenius has never been buried at the Östra Kyrkogården Cemetary. His body has never been it seems, in the coffin. Rocks and hay draped in colorful raw fabrics had replaced the body instead. Certain clues seem to confirm that Aronesius was actually not dead and that he fled Sweden to go to Switzerland. The reason for this escape is unknown but the photograph printed here: discovered in 1958 in the attic of a cottage from the canton of Zug, Switzerland in 1958 would confirm this hypothesis. The witnesses at the time spoke of a recluse man living in a mountain cottage until one day once more he would disappear without leaving a trace. That same cottage contained many canvases that mysteriously resembled those of Sean Montgomery. These works have unfortunately been destroyed in a fire of suspect origin, but photographs of these works have long been in the collection of the Musée de l’art Brut of Lausanne until they disappeared by thieves with an important lot of accounting documents. The authorities and the direction of the Museum have declined requests for an interview.
Then in 2009, this mysterious episode in Göteborg as well as the recent and mysterious exile of Montgomery in the United States where he supposedly paints obsessively hidden in a basement of a bungalow of a university town in the state of New-York at the same time when his career is starting to bring him recognition that a few centuries of assiduous practice has brought to him (see a recent article on the Modern Painters Magazine of April 2011 and the poster included with this text). The owners of the Laroche/Joncas Gallery claim they have no further information about this matter, but lets bet that the elusive Montgomery won’t even be present at his Montréal vernissage of his latest works.
Interestingly, the work of Sean Montgomery shares a similar sensibility for the pastel hues, the same angst and the same fascination for Magic Castles and heraldic symbolism that we find in the paintings of Arosenius. An immense solitude characterises the paintings of both artists and all tends to demonstrate that Arosenius/Montgomery would be the same person, the immortal painter of legend, transcending time and frontiers to live the ecstasy to paint eternally. One of Montgomery's recent paintings titled “The Funeral of Death” represents a crowd of happy midgets carrying the coffin of a skeleton. It’s a direct transposition of the 1903 water color of Aronesius. The title “The Funeral of Death” is a direct evocation of the principle of immortality. Coincidence? We are tempted to doubt this. The common points between the two practices abound and we can follow effortlessly the marked evolution of a practice except the gap of one generation, the Swiss period from which unfortunately no documents have survived. The stories taken from the Bible, the fairytales and works such as The Thousand and One Nights that Arosenius painted, have given way today in Montgomery’s production to a mythology of its time in which the blazers and the logos of sports organizations of ice sports, motifs of woolen shirts or flanelle as well as the reference to numerology reflect the artist’s fascination for Nordic mysticism. It’s an evolution that has taken place over centuries in the practice of painting. Should we be surprised of a certain disenchantment with the traditional techniques that he has developed in the course of his long life at the profit of synthetic materials of the 21st century – or is it simply boredom ? Perhaps. Is it a strategy to blur the facts of his immortality? The photograph of Sean taken in Göteborg in a moment of ‘égarement’ in front of Arosenius’ self portrait will shed light on the mystery, once and for all…
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Exhibitions
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012 | Jessica Campbell Learning to Live With Your Aloneness December 15 - January 26, 2013 | | | Yadir Quintana 'Femmes' November 3-December 8, 2012 | | | HKJB UPSIDEDOWNTURN September 12 - October 20, 2012 | | | Never Look Back, July 25 - September 1, 2012 | | | Jon Knowles Blood Oranges June 13 - July 23, 2012 | | | Jana Sterbak -Back Home- May 5-June 9 2012 | | | Benjamin King-You Are Leaving- March 30 - April 28, 2012 | | | > | Sean Montgomery - Avant Garage - February 18 - March 24, 2012
| | | Patrick Dunford. January 14 - February 11, 2012 | | | Jean-Philippe Harvey - These Things Take Time. November 17 - December 24, 2011 | | |
