Francis Montillaud is a young artist born in the Québec City region. After obtaining a bachelor’s degree in visual arts at Université Laval in 2003, where he concentrated in new media. He moved to Montréal and earned a master’s degree in visual and media arts at UQAM. He was selected to be in the Manifestation internationale d’art 3: Cynismes? de Québec, presented by curators Patrice Loubier and André-Louis Paré in 2005. In 2009, his participation in the Paysages Éphémères festival was critically acclaimed, bringing him to the notice of the public in Montréal.
Artwork description
La montagne retracée is deployed on a support wall along Chemin de la Côte-des-Neiges between Forest Hill and Ridgewood avenues, facing the entrance to the cemetery. The work is composed of schematic elements and symbols made of aluminum and bronze referring to the Mount Royal’s history, topography, and vernacular and agricultural past. It includes a lighting system that makes it visible at night. Like artefacts, its component objects evoke the anonymous presence of people who shaped the space. The work invites people to remember this place of passage that is traversed by one of the main original streets of the town of Montréal and imagine its future.
The artist collaborated with the firm EXMURO arts publics for this project.
“Through its encyclopedic nature, the work revisits history, human activity, and the territory. It presents figurative elements in an abstract setting to link scientific imagery to a fantastic universe. Thanks to formal interplays between sculpture and painting, the mural is a hybrid between the immaterial and the material, between representation and reality.”
– Francis Montillaud