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Middle of Nowhere: Painting the Town

Claude Simard’s Public Art, Larouche, Quebec

By Rafael Katigbak

Simard's warehouse

Photo by Émile Couture

It’s a sunny Sunday in Larouche, and like most villages in Quebec’s Saguenay region, parents are outside washing their trucks and tending their manicured gardens, while teenagers kick up dust on their ATVs. On my stroll down the 600-metre stretch of aluminum-sided housing they call “main street,” I’ve bumped into the mayor, the village treasurer and pretty much everybody in town. They wave cheerily.

Nestled between a small mountain and highway 170, the place doesn’t seem to be much more than a sneeze along the provincial highway. And that might have been the case until a little over three years ago when Larouche-born, New York-based artist and curator Claude Simard began repurposing dilapidated ancestral homes and importing structures brick by brick from southern Asia, with the ultimate goal of turning this unassuming rural community into a giant art installation. “It’s an original setting to have an international dialogue,” Simard explained when I met him some weeks earlier, 1,000 kilometres away in his Chelsea gallery in New York. To say that this bucolic hamlet of just over a thousand people makes an unlikely destination for world-class visual art would be an understatement.

My first stop is Simard’s new restaurant, the Margot. What seems like a quaint roadside eatery from the outside turns out to be a modern French restaurant and bar where business people and truck drivers dine side by side under original works by Molinari and Riopelle. Instead of the regional specialty Tourtière du Saguenay, I get Thon Rouge, Salsa de Mangues. Plus, it’s the only place with an espresso machine in a 10-kilometre radius.

I’m here to meet Simard’s brother-in-law and right-hand man, Daniel Pedneault, an affable guy with a handshake firmed from over a decade in the heavy construction business. Next door, he shows me the former industrial-window factory that’s now a New York-style loft gallery. Next to that, a presbytery transplanted from Saint-Bruno and an old fromagerie are being converted into a modern 16-room auberge done up in a minimalist style and a museum. Up the road, I find the former decontamination plant now warehouses over 300 works of art, including paintings, sculptures and decorative arts from 16th-century India to mid-century New York. New exhibitions – which change several times a year and have featured work from Betty Goodwin, Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol – are held in the old Larouche presbytery. In the basement of a nearby home, minimalist sculptures of Donald Judd and Dan Flavin lean next to vibrant English tapestries and precious religious artifacts, all awaiting display.

Pastoral art havens are not necessarily a new idea; Mass MoCA in Massachusetts and Dia:Beacon north of New York City have both proven that contemporary art in a small-town setting can make a striking contrast. But Simard is integrating art into the community and redefining the idea of regional architecture. You could say he’s changing the landscape.

Case in point: I walk south along Rue Gauthier in search of the future site of the church facade, which, I’m told, “can’t be missed.” As I round the gentle curve, a raised plot of land appears like a cowboy at high noon at the bend ahead. There is no doubt the impact will be stunning. After all, it won’t be everyday you’ll see an 18th-century Indo-Portuguese Catholic Church – rescued from imminent destruction 16,000 kilometres away in India – smack in the middle of small-town Quebec.