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| The late Fr. Adrien Arsenault |
I have often facetiously commented that I was raised as a literary and aesthetic Modernist as well as a Catholic. Stranger still, I was raised to believe the two creeds were oddly compatible (a claim that might have troubled Joyce, and that Eliot would only embrace in late works when his avant garde was down). The creeds could, of course, only co-exist so long as I held in abeyance the dogmatic elements of each in favour of their mystic, ecstatic, and artistic traditions.
This creed was the legacy of the humanities as taught at St. Dunstan's University in the 1960s and at UPEI in the 1970s, and it found its apotheosis in the teaching and artistic production of Fr. Adrien Arsenault. His aesthetic oeuvre is joyously celebrated at the Musée Acadien in Miscouche this summer, in the show “A Life of Expressions/Expressions de toute une vie.”
Fr. Adrien's work is most important for its synthetic, syncretic response to the art movements of the 20th century, by way of all of art history. Ambitious in form and content and enthusiastic in execution, his paintings, pottery, and ceramics nonetheless sometimes show exuberance, rather than foresight, with media (a trouble that plagued another artist of rampant energy, Leonardo da Vinci). Time finds many of Fr. Adrien's drawings in felt-tip pen sadly faded. Unfaded reproductions such as the powerful “Lendemains de Guernica” and “L'Annonciation” become (ironically) a gloss on technology, set beside fading originals that mirror the problem of the eternal spirit in the ephemeral body.
The issue is not that Fr. Adrien would use just any material to create art—rather that he would use every material. Fr. Adrien's catholicity of aesthetic taste is probably best expressed in the collages he prepared for the series published as The Dust Is Earth (with text by my father, Frank Ledwell). These integrate cut-out and collaged images from across art history, assembled with instinct for order and chaos, and refashioned and reframed by Adrien's pen into expressions of his personality, taste, and faith.
“Expressions of a Life” is appropriately packed with material, expertly curated by Henry Purdy. That the show takes over even the backs of doors is an illustration of the problem of fitting everything in. The sheer force of content also crowds out time and energy to give Fr. Adrien's written works full consideration.
Archival text, photos, and multimedia emphasize Fr. Adrien's pride in his Acadian heritage. The historical bits also make vivid the human tragedy of Fr. Adrien's too-early death—and, equally, the tragic loss of the School of Visual Arts (where so many of the pieces featured in the show were created, exhibited, or launched) and the tragic lack of a provincial gallery, where retrospectives such as this one could be mounted regularly.
The tragedies are lightened by this resurrection of Fr. Adrien's generous, spirited, exemplary work.
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