Two Outaouais artists find hope in the chaos

Tashi Farmilo

When Guy Bessette and Jacques Desgagnés look out at the world right now, they see chaos. Their answer is to make art about hope. The two Outaouais painters are bringing their work together for Regards croisés, an exhibition opening Thursday, June 12 at the Centre d'art contemporain de l'Outaouais, 101 rue Montcalm in Gatineau. A vernissage runs that day from 4 to 7 pm, with the show open to the public the following two weekends, June 13-14 and June 20-21, from 11 am to 6 pm. Admission is free.

The two met several years ago and recognized in each other something that goes deeper than style. Neither begins a canvas with a predetermined destination. Both describe a process in which the painting leads and the artist follows, coaxing something out of the unconscious rather than imposing a vision onto it. Their finished works look nothing alike, but they come from the same place, and that shared root is what the exhibition's title points to. Regards croisés, or crossed gazes, suggests two different ways of seeing that are nonetheless aimed in the same direction.

Bessette's contribution is a series of 24 abstract oil paintings called Traverser la nuit, contempler le jour, made between 2023 and 2026. He works in oil every day without exception, and the series accumulated the way sustained daily practice tends to – one thing leading to another, the work deciding its own shape. What began as two panels grew into groupings of six, then pulled in solitary canvases that nonetheless belong to the same story. Twenty-one of the 24 paintings are arranged into four polyptych ensembles. Throughout the process, poetry grew alongside the paintings, not to explain them but because both were coming from the same place at the same time. Visitors can access short video clips weaving the two together by scanning QR codes in the gallery.

The title comes from a simple image that carries a lot of weight for Bessette. Night is difficulty, anxiety, the accumulated pressure of a troubled era. Day is what happens when you stop long enough to watch the sun come up and realize that everything is still capable of beginning again. He does not frame this as naïve optimism. The chaos is real. The point is that morning keeps arriving anyway.

Desgagnés comes at the same territory from a different angle. His paintings invite what he describes as an inner journey, asking visitors to step into the work rather than stand outside it. He thinks about light the way some artists think about structure: as something both technical and alive, something that can be shaped with contrast and transparency and texture, but that also carries meaning, pointing toward the parts of human experience that resist easy description. He has spent years exploring the five senses as a framework for that kind of perception, looking for what painting can do that language cannot.

He had, at a certain point, considered walking away from painting entirely. He wondered whether some other form of expression might be waiting for him. It was not. And when Bessette proposed the exhibition, something shifted. The collaboration gave him a reason to push further into the work he had already been doing, and a context in which that work could speak to something beyond itself.

What both artists want, finally, is modest and enormous at the same time. They want someone to stand in front of a painting and feel, for a moment, that the ground is still there. That the world is not only what the news says it is. Bessette has a way of putting it that stays with you: an artist sets the table, he says. What the visitor takes from it is their own.