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.

Roald Nasgaard (MA, University of British Columbia; PhD, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University), Professor of Art History, and, for the past decade, Chair of the Art Department at Florida State University, began his teaching career at the University of Guelph in 1971. In the years between, before returning to academia, he had a long and distinguished museum career. From 1975 to 1978 he served as Curator of Contemporary Art and then, until 1993, as Chief Curator at the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto. Among the many exhibition catalogues he authored are Yves Gaucher: A Fifteen-Year Perspective (1979); Structures for Behaviour: New Sculptures by Robert Morris, David Rabinowich, Richard Serra and George Trakas (1978); The Mystic North: Symbolist Landscape Painting in Northern Europe and North America, 1890-1940 (1984); Gerhard Richter: Paintings (1988); and Pleasures of Sight and States of Being: Radical Abstract Painting Since 1990 (2001). Other major curatorial projects at the AGO include The European Iceberg: Creativity in Germany and Italy Today (1985) and Free Worlds: Metaphors and Realities in Contemporary Hungarian Art. Nasgaard has held several Canada Council fellowships and grants as well as a Research Fellowship at the National Gallery of Canada Library and Archives (2002). He won an OAAG Curatorial Writing Award in 1991 for his essay in Individualités: 14 Contemporary Artists from France. Nasgaard was born in Denmark and is a Canadian citizen.

Roald Nasgaard's profile page

Olivier Asselin est professeur agrégé au Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques de l'Université de Montréal. Il est co-directeur de Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008). -- Olivier Asselin is associate professor of the Département d'histoire de l'art et d'études cinématographiques at the Université de Montréal. He is co-editor of Precarious Visualities (McGill-Queen's University Press, 2008).

Olivier Asselin's profile page

Michiko Yajima Gagnon's profile page

Monika Kin Gagnon's writings have been published in numerous books, including topographies: aspects of recent B.C. art, Fluid Exchanges: Artists and Critics in the AIDS Crisis, and A Leap in the Dark, as well as many artist catalogues and magazines. She has a doctorate in philosophy from Simon Fraser University, and a Masters degree from York University. She is an associate professor in Communications Studies at Concordia University in Montreal.

Monika Kin Gagnon's profile page