No Country for Candor (speech)
Good evening everyone. Thank you for being here with me tonight.
The exhibition No Country for Candor began with a very simple desire. I wanted to create something that, for one summer, could truly belong to Théâtre Lac-Brome.
A theatre is a place where imagination is taken seriously. People come here to listen, to look, to feel, to be moved by things that are invented and yet, somehow, so deeply true. I knew I wanted to create something special for this place. But I did not know how to enter this new series. So I went back to the beginning, to the primitive question: where does the need to create come from?
The need.
That sudden, devouring urge to pick up a brand-new crayon from a brand-new box and leave a trace. Before hesitation. Before the desire to please becomes a prison.
A child draws because the hand wants to move. Because colour is there. Because there is a sheet of paper in front of them. That is all. And that is already so much.
One day, while I was thinking about this exhibition and what I wanted it to become, my five-year-old nephew Victor showed me one of his drawings and said to me, very proudly: “Look, Auntie Annie, I didn’t go outside the lines at all.” At first, I smiled, of course. He is so cute, and he draws so well. Then it reminded me of what that desire to “do it right” really means.
Most of us learn very early to stay inside the lines. At first, it is an achievement. Later, it becomes a habit. And sometimes, for some of us, it can become a rigid structure that we eventually mistake for ourselves.
My work is deeply entangled in that structure. I am obsessed with precision. I build my paintings very, very slowly. It takes a great deal of discipline.
But this time, I wanted to try something else. I wanted to explore a line that had not yet learned to obey.
Each painting in this series is inspired by a child’s drawing, which I used not as a model, but as a starting point. Almost as a permission. Permission to choose colours that scream a little. Permission to show strange forms. Permission to put sparkles everywhere.
From there, the work became a meeting between my world and the child’s gesture. The innocence of the scribble passed through the ruthless filter of my own language. And that is how the tension appeared. It runs through all four paintings. They are luminous, but not light. Playful, but not simple. Controlled, but not tamed.
These paintings speak about the energy of making. About raw pleasure. And about the immense difficulty of being free.
The exhibition is called No Country for Candor because I refuse to believe that candor is an insignificant thing. There is absolutely nothing ordinary about the first impulse to create.
Opening a brand-new tube of paint. Wow! Light bismuth yellow. Pure magic! Marveling at everything it makes possible.
And there is nothing naive about the part of us that needs to transform the world, even if that world is only a sheet of paper, or a wooden panel, or a theatre wall.
So yes, it is true. In the end, I did not manage to go outside the lines. But maybe that is also a form of life. Filling small spaces with colour, hour after hour, day after day, patiently, lovingly. And maybe, that is perfectly fine too.
Thank you.