Additional Images

Provenance:

Private Collection, Ontario.

Literature:

Mayo Graham, “Joe Fafard, The Bronze Years,” Montreal, 1996, page 29 and 31.

Terrence Heath, “Joe Fafard,” Toronto, 2007, page 97.

Note:

Known for his animal representations and portraits, Fafard utilizes various mediums such as clay, bronze and steel in his creations. Fafard's lifelike sculptures are described by curator Mayo Graham to contain an “...animated, uncanny presence, as much as iconography or description, gives Fafard's figures the sense that they are characters inhabiting a narrative”.

Like other portraits, “Auguste” encapsulates movement, as if Fafard has captured a moment in a story. Heath’s description of Fafard's sculpture of his father, “Mon pere”, can also be applied to “Auguste”: “There is a certain sense that he is present and could also get up and be absent. The figure has authority, a paterfamilias quality, but there is vulnerability, or hesitancy or perhaps gullibility, in the stance as well. The chair would have welcomed him to recline and relax, but he is perched on the edge, ready to say the next thing, ready to move on.” The year “Auguste” was done, Fafard had also done a similar sculpture titled “Renoir,” where the nineteenth-century artist is sitting upright rather than leaning forward. As with many other artists depicted, Fafard has continued to sculpt and even draw Pierre-Auguste Renoir throughout his career; art which has been collected and exhibited by many major art institutions such as the National Gallery of Canada, McMichael Canadian Art Collection and the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia. Graham writes that “there is a deep sense that certain of Fafard's figures are effigies as much as portraits... the portraits of Van Gogh, Cezanne, Monet, Renoir and Picasso construe a brotherhood in the history of art”. Graham also quotes Fafard: “I feel a bit like a novice studying the lives of the saints”. Fafard’s humble approach instills his art with a sense of raw expression, as an artist whose ambition is unaffected by easily outdated trends and academic expectations, but rather, simply put, seeks to provide his vision a form.