Pierre Leblanc was born in Montréal and has lived and worked in Val-David since 1974. He received his initiation to sculpture at the Fonderie expérimentale de Pierrefonds, where he worked alongside sculptors André Fournelle and Armand Vaillancourt.
His artworks are exhibited regularly in North America and Europe and are in a number of public collections, including the Musée du Bas-Saint-Laurent, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, and the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal. In 2011, le Musée d’art contemporain des Laurentides presented Signes et repères, a solo exhibition of his recent works. Leblanc has also produced many public art projects throughout Québec.
Artwork description
Lieux sans temple 3 is presented on the outdoor site of the Musée de Lachine, near two other works in the same series. It is a rudimentary vertical structure composed of various metal elements: a wheel, rods, salvaged metal pieces, small stairs, a small ladder, and so on.
In the Lieux sans temple series, Leblanc concentrates the viewer’s gaze on miniaturized structures whose verticality could easily refer to towers or lighthouses. Emerging from emptiness, the ladders and miniature stairs that traverse these assemblages are even more unexpected because ascent to the summit of the artworks would seem to be a very precarious enterprise.
An ironic look at knowledge and the accomplishments of human engineering (the presence of the wheel), the Lieux sans temple sculptures test the elaboration of human dreams and utopias in the late twentieth century. They challenge the validity of progress that is not based on deep philosophical reflection integrating culture and society.