Luc Giard

Luc Giard

Luc Giard (born 1956) occupies a unique place in the contemporary art scene; he uses the conventions of comics as material to construct a body of work that defies official categorization. Giard recreates in color film noir universes populated by antiheroes and femme fatales, he favors contrast over gradations and treats light like a cinematographer to frame his subject. Giard’s imagination is obsessive, haunted by traces of childhood and early aesthetic stirrings. Curious, a voracious reader, and a compulsive collector of art books, he draws from literature—Poe, Hugo, Beckett, Camus—and from pop culture, which he uses as a Trojan horse to lead us back to the fine arts. His images, handcrafted and feverishly created, are declarations of love to the artists who shaped him and continue to inspire him, suns and sources of oxygen in the dark and suffocating world in which he is confined. His references to art history provoke a dialogue between the great classical and modern masters and those of the 9th art(comic art)—Hergé, Frank Miller, Franquin, Herriman. From primitive to pop art, from the Fauves to the Cubists, a multitude of styles collide, rendered with a prodigious economy of means. Giard shakes things up and disturbs, attempting to elucidate the mysteries of suffering and the absurd human condition.

Essay by Robert Poulin, Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec

Graphic Mirror by John K. Grande
When I visited so long ago in 2008, Luc Giard’s studio had the look of a Schwitters’ Merzbau. His place was like a live-in artwork. His drawings were piled up along walls, up the walls, on tables, and with a method. Individual drawings collected as an assemblage of life’s work become installation. Piles of art at various stages were a kind of testament to one artist’s commitment to the process of drawing, sketching, creating – this was Giard’s Montréal studio… The wild smorgasbord of pop and commercial. Culture’s available players are suspects in a plot that never ends. It’s a pulp fiction-like storyboard full of barbs and cadences that shower your soul. And always a dark expressive flair. The soul of Luc Giard always peeps through the curtains. Each cliche a mirror to his momentary fleeting emotions transposed into these cartoon freeze-frame images.

Giard produces! Images by the reams, and books ad infinitum. The smaller book productions Giard has published like A Village under My Pillow or Donut Death are inspired gems of creative output. Like Robert Crumb who brought cartooning out of the ghetto and back to the level of high art, Luc Giard moves beyond the bounds of conventional cartoon art. His characters, are relocated in new scenarios… His is a free parking kind of autobiography whose storyline is enacted in a world that jumps right out of Giard’s psyche. Ironing out the 3D real life experience to remove the creases, he pulls the imagery onto flat white pages. A succession of comic book characters interact with each other. Tintin is on good terms with Batman and asks him how he speaks French… Batman replies, “They killed my parents”. Montréal irony enters into the bilingual colloquial world. Giard reanimates these characters with an expressive flair – in a word VERVE! Batman, Tintin, Felix the Cat and his own anima – Ticoune Ze Whiz Tornado (death to all who oppose him), a character who figures in many of his productions as a bilingual fantasist.

Giard’s way of conceiving and creating a story is intensely hybrid, and the dialogue is very personal. It is all reanimated, given new sets and dressed up. The f lair is expressive, like the jottings and sketches of a schoolboy in his modest exercise book, hidden from view until revealed.

Luc Giard is a generous soul and that’s what counts. He is not some two-bit cowboy. He designs images and stories about life’s complexity. He juggles with a pantheon of comic book icons, all the more likeable after they have escaped their original scripted roles.

The Runs or routines as Giard animates and calls it are his response to a contemporary art world sealed up with its plastic players and coterie of mediocre bureaucrats and artists who play to each other until they die of boredom. He escapes into his own world and grows it, the constant gardener of familiar cartoon characters. His f irst ”Runs” were nothing to do with art. The Runs began from 775 rue Wilder in 1966 after his family moved to Outremont when he was ten. They were sorties, the kids going out to seek new adventures. Giard commemorated all the magic of childhood Runs in a prose poem, “On rencontre le monde / On achète des livres / On publie la douleur / On va chez Dunkin / On lit le livre / On revient vers sa femme / Demain / Et on recommence…”¹. For outsider artists the Run can also be applied. It is an alternative, a creative fuelling station, a process-based alternative to museums and galleries, a place or places you go (within or out in the world). It is a place to get input and inspiration. On the Run, you cannot be identified as an artist per se. Blip… Blip… Beep… Beep…

In one sketch “En remontant aux origines de la ‘Run’”, a comfy armchair occupies the image in front and centre. A series of references or sources for the artist Giard appear like bubbles, connected by directional arrows and they shed their clues – Milou – Le Lotus bleu – L’Oreille cassé– Hergé – Jackson Pollock – Schulz

¹Luc Giard ; Le Petit Giard Illustré, (Montréal, Canada : Galerie Robert Poulin, 2023), p. 37. 72 73
Sally – Linus – Snoopy – Red Baron – Coltrane – Bruce Nauman – Back in Black – AC DC – Hells Bells – TNT – Highway to Hell – Ticoune – It’s a map of Giard’s way of thinking, the tributaries of his inspiration. The way we all think is not so different. Luc Giard is proof positive Montreal is a jazz town – the city that raised Oscar Peterson, Charlie Biddle and so so many other jazz musicians…

The references are constantly realigning in abstract sequences that have a Franz Kline-like blackness and painterly austerity. They live in a ghostly world of recreated memory structures. The story sequences bring it all to life. Pop culture references drawn from the dépanneur or the mediatic surges of a culture of abundance range from Hot wheels and Matchbox cars, to Milou. It’s a world that upscales the imaginative, references media dross, and uses the banal as a springboard to dive into his own world. He uses everyday materials like ballpoint pens, pencil, crayon, China or India ink and gouache.

The “staple pieces” have the same resourcefulness as Rauschenberg, drawing on scarcity to reveal abundance. Giard’s subtle humour persists through it all. A clipping, like the other fragments stapled into these assemblages says, “The Rage goes on”. It could be, or is, a comment on cultural norms in our times. The figure is in motion, a sketch of a time where nobody has time. Ingenious minimal fragments go together to make a thought or a scene in the stapled pieces. The fragments come from the everyday magazine or advertising detritus pieced together. The images are thought frames. Each scenario Giard brings out has an extravagance for it is undertaken at the expense of more sacred notions of what art is or should be.

Giard’s makes his own references, colloquial cues, hidden meanings using the pantheon of comic characters he knows and loves. He made his own Batman cards with gouache when young. He also worked at le Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal library in 1980. He was always very aware of the contemporary arts scene. At the age of 21 he went to see a Jasper Johns show at the Whitney Museum in New York. Richard Serra was among his favourites. Giard’s Giacometti Portrait made the cover of Drawn & Quarterly in 1992 a Montreal periodical he contributed to regularly. Like Giacometti, Giard works incessantly most of the time, with a real commitment to his art. Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns – which revisits and reinscribes Batman was a source of inspiration for Giard (cartoon subjects could be given new lives). Of course, we all identify with the cartoon master Jack Kirby whose Hulk, Iron Man, Thor and Spider-Man became new heroes in new found galaxies and realities. All this out of ether…

The portraits are frontal and look out at you as severe and expressive fleeting personas with a presence… expressive … each is seemingly on its own. This is Giard’s gallery of Roman busts, for the portraits are universal and classic in their facial typologies. Each face stares straight out, is isolated, entirely on its own – anomie.

These cliches are a mirror to Giard’s soul, these momentary fleeting emotions are transposed into freeze-frame images. Immediate impact. Between the various characters in this demi-monde, Giard is always searching for a meaning. Virtual beings are conceived and created, pulled out of a hat like a rabbit. They are comfortable in their Hebdo or Ti-Gars roles. Like Toronto artist John Scott’s rabbit-eared characters in his napkin drawings and larger cartoons, Luc Giard’s are immediately accessible to anyone. From pen and ink to the last frontier, Giard’s a child of our times

And Luc Giard has a structural vision, that of an outsider’s mind. He can look on and see a world where deconstruction is the ethos. Could the Latin studies at Collège Jean de Brébeuf have led to the invisible structures of his self-generated aesthetic? With an intense expression he can fuse it all together into stories and image fragments that draw us in. The scenarios could be hotels, baseball games, the street… One thinks of Emil Nolde, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmidt Rottluff, Edvard Munch and other expressionists from Germany, part of the pantheon of art history. Luc Giard’s is an intelligent gaze. He hybridizes past with present and all from a world of his own invention. The sweat from all his creative endeavours is the salt of the earth. If cartoon life has a life maintenance plan, Giard is the man to fabricate the new hybrids, pulling them off the assembly line to reinvent their dialogues, their contexts, to present his own realizations as something more than cartoon life, more like art and the processes it involves, which are like life. ARS LONGA, VITA BREVIS.

Essay by John K. Grande

John K. Grande’s writings have appeared in Artforum, Vice Versa, Art Papers, British Journal of Photography, Burlington Magazine, Lensculture, Interalia, ARTE ES, Espace, Border Crossings, Public Art Review, Vie des Arts, La Revue Espace and Landscape Architecture. 74 75

Solo Shows:
2023 Luc Giard ‘100 dessins’, Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec.
2012 Luc Giard ‘Konoshiko’, Cegep du Vieux-Montreal, Quebec.
1984 Luc Giard ‘Sculptures’, Galerie Articule, Montreal, Quebec.

Group Shows:
2024 Luc Giard – Foire Plural 23, Montreal, Galerie Robert Poulin.
2020 ‘En tête a la une’ – Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec.
2019 ‘Mur a mur II’ – Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec.
2017 ‘Marginaux et Francs-Tireurs’ – La Maison de la Culture Frontenac – Montreal, Quebec.
2016 ‘Mur a mur I – Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec.
2014 ‘Histoires de Tête – Galerie Robert Poulin, Montreal, Quebec.
2011 – 2016 Le Repaire des 100 Talents (Adeline Lamarre et Luc Poudrier).
2004 – 2020 Le Studio 9th Art (Marc Jette).
2002 – 2010 Librairie Fichtre (Yves Millet.)
2000 – 2010 Librairie Grafton (Dermot Green).
1991 Galerie Paper Heads, Melbourne, Australia.
1979 Galerie Gille Gherbrandt, Montreal, Quebec.