30 Sep 2024
Yechel Gagnon is proud to announce the creation of a major work, Le cycle du présent, a particular model of senior housing that focuses on the quality of the living environment inaugurated at the Maison des aînés de Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu. This 140-foot bas-relief unfolds like a frieze along the building’s main hallway, the axis that connects the different units. Its imagery and colours are designed to reflect the region’s history and characteristic environment, while also conjuring up the changing of the seasons.
This vibrant work helps provide reassuring surroundings for the residents and their professional and informal caregivers and leaves it up to each individual to connect with it and form a personal interpretation. Lying somewhere between abstraction and figuration, an imaginary landscape with multiple perspectives, it interweaves elements of nature to produce various transitions. The rhythms and implicit passages of time call to mind the cycle of seasons and days.
The frieze consists of panels of colourfully stained veneers and natural wood species, hand-carved with routers and sanders. It suggests “moments” and atmospheres enhanced by the richness of the materials used. Working in symbiosis with the site, it affords comfort, calm, serenity, and well-being through the warmth it exudes, while expressing the contact with nature that we all need.
“The work is directly linked to the nature and history of Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, as it transforms the long hallway in the Maison des aînés into the magnificent, truly unique path in the Chambly Canal park that runs alongside Old Saint-Jean," explains Yechel Gagnon. "When you walk along the path, you are constantly surrounded by the river and the trees.”
Bathed in natural light, and emanating a quiet energy, this work devoid of all artifice engages in a dialogue with the outside environment and offers a reminder of the beneficial effects that humans receive from the visual arts.
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