Born in Granby, Charles Daudelin took Paul-Émile Borduas’s advice to move to Montréal, where he took courses at the École du meuble from 1939 to 1943. Elected a member of the Contemporary Arts Society in 1941, he lived in New York and then in Paris, where he attended Fernand Léger’s studio. Teaching at the École des beaux arts de Montréal, Daudelin created the “integrated art” section there in 1963. Among his most prestigious accomplishments in integration art are the altarpiece in the Sacred Heart chapel at the Notre-Dame basilica and the sculpture-fountain Embâcle at Place du Québec in Paris.
Artwork description
This assembly of hollow cubes is part of Daudelin’s contemporary work in cubic shapes. It is also evident in such sculptures as Allegrocube, a cube split in two, which was installed in front of Montréal’s Palais de Justice in 1973. Unlike that artwork, the sculpture in front of École Joseph-Charbonneau, which dates from 1979, is in the form of hollow cubes, another way the artist developed a geometric aesthetic based on the cube.