A personal and intimate perspective on one of Canada's most prominent 20th century multidisciplinary artists, who was once described as "abstraction’s poet-philosopher."

Charles Gagnon (1934–2003) was a painter, photographer and filmmaker considered by many to be an important figure in Quebec and Canadian art in the 20th century.

His early career emerged alongside the American Abstract Expressionists and his growing multidisciplinary practice broke away from the singularity of painting shared by his Montreal contemporaries of the Automatistes and the Plasticiens. The complexity and depth of his work as a painter, photographer, and filmmaker was distinguished by a probing, introspective quality. His paintings were simultaneously rigid and free-flowing, with self-imposed rules and structure contrasted by rich fracture and gestural brush work. Across all disciplines he played with multiple levels of perception, and many works evoke the liminal space of the threshold, or multi-plane spaces.

In Charles Gagnon: The Colour of Time, the Sound of Space, this long-standing multidisciplinary work is brought into full view with texts that explore Gagnon’s various practices, from painting to photography to film. An English-language essay by art historian and curator Roald Nasgaard chronicles Gagnon’s artistic evolution from his early years in New York in the 1950s to his final productive years in the late 1990s in Quebec, and situates him within an expanded international historical context of artists, artworks, and art movements. Filmmaker and professor Olivier Asselin’s French-language essay engages Gagnon’s use of different media, including the role of sound and music in his artworks. Michiko Yajima Gagnon, the wife of the late artist, gives insight into the inseparability of everyday life and Charles’s creative undertakings: his friendships with other artists (Tōru Takemitsu, Lee Friedlander), travel (to New York, Japan, and, particularly, the American Southwest), and the relationship between the landscapes surrounding his studios and his artwork.

Featuring more than 250 art reproductions and archival images, Charles Gagnon is an intimate portrait of an artist and the celebration of a life’s work.

About the Authors

Roald Nasgaard is a teacher, writer, and curator. He is the author of the critically acclaimed book Abstract Painting in Canada (2007). His major exhibitions and accompanying books include The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America 1890–1940 (1984); the first Gerhard Richter retrospective in North America (1988); The Automatiste Revolution: Montreal 1941–1960 (2009); and The Plasticiens and Beyond: Montreal 1955–1970 (2014). More recently he co-curated Mystical Landscapes (2016) for the Art Gallery of Ontario and the Mus�e d’Orsay in Paris and Higher States: Lawren Harris and His American Contemporaries (2017) for the McMichael Canadian Art Collection.

Olivier Asselin is a professor of film and media arts at the Universit� de Montr�al. He is the co-editor of several books, including Precarious Visualities (2008), The Electric Age (2011), Menlo Park 3: Machines uchroniques (Universit� Laval, 2014), Espaces de savoir (2016), and Dispositifs immersifs monumentaux et collectifs (2023). Asselin has also contributed to two retrospective exhibition catalogues of Charles Gagnon’s work, the first in 1998 for the Mus�e national des beaux-arts du Qu�bec and the second in 2001 for the Mus�e d’art contemporain de Montr�al. He also published a book on Gagnon’s photography with Montreal’s Dazibao art centre in 2006. Asselin has written and directed several films and designed a number of augmented-reality experiences.

Michiko Yajima Gagnon was born in Tokyo, Japan, studied in New York, and lives in Montreal and Ayer’s Cliff, Quebec. She was the owner and director of Yajima Galerie, Montreal, from 1974 to 1985, one of the first Canadian commercial galleries to feature contemporary Canadian photographers and artists. She curated the group exhibition Elementae Naturae at the Mus�e d’art contemporain de Montr�al in 1987.

Monika Kin Gagnon is a professor of Communication Studies at Concordia University, Montreal. She is the author, editor, and co-editor of numerous essays and books, including Other Conundrums: Race, Culture and Canadian Art (2000), Reimagining Cinema: Film at Expo 67 (2014), and In Search of Expo 67 (2021). In 2010, she assembled the DVD set Charles Gagnon: 4 Films, including his unfinished film R69, named after Yves Gaucher’s painting of the same name. She is a member of the research group Archive/Counter-Archive and is currently completing the book Posthumous Cinema: Unfinished Films in the Archives. She is the daughter of Charles and Michiko Gagnon.

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