Francine Simonin

Biography

Francine Simonin worked most often on the floor. Her sheets of paper grew so large over time that they turned into whole installations, and she painted on them in acrylic, ink, chalk and pastel: the female body in motion, from a live model; landscape, usually churned up, from memory; and signs and scripts. She worked through her subjects in series, from “Fêtes tribales” (1979) and “Les chaises” (1986) to “Abécédaire pour ma mère” (1992) and “Salut Michaux” (2005).

She had started, though, with small blocks for printmaking.

Simonin was born on 2 October 1936 in Lausanne, spent her childhood between Lausanne and Champex in the canton of Valais, came early to painting, literature and music, and drew a great deal. In 1953 she entered the École cantonale des beaux-arts in Lausanne and studied with the painter Marcel Poncet and the sculptor Casimir Reymond, whose studio she attended in 1958–1960; there she got to know Lélo Fiaux, Violette Diserens, Jean-Pierre Kaiser and Jean-Claude Hesselbarth. Afterwards she travelled widely in Europe. In the early 1960s she met Marguerite Duras, whose prose overwhelmed her, and their friendship lasted into the 1980s; later she became close to the designer Janette Laverrière.

From 1958 to 1966 Simonin worked above all in woodcut and copper engraving. In Pully she worked in the studio of Pierre Cailler, founder of the Guilde de la gravure, and there met the printer Raymond Meyer, with whom she then worked all her life, always ready to try something new. In 1964 she received the federal painting grant; in 1965 her first exhibition opened, at the Galerie Maurice Bridel in Lausanne; and from 1970 she showed regularly at Gilbert Huguenin’s Galerie Numaga in Auvernier, later with Nane Cailler in Pully. She discovered Montreal in 1968 thanks to a grant from the Canada Council for the Arts, and in 1971 she moved there. In Montreal she met Jean-Paul Riopelle, René Derouin, Serge Lemoyne and Pierre Ayot. While staying loyal to Meyer, she also printed in Quebec workshops, with Danielle Blouin, Alain Piroir and at Bonnie Baxter’s Le Scarabée, and occasionally in Europe with Murtra Edicions and with Raynald Métraux. She joined the groups Media and Contraste and took part in founding Xylon-Québec, the Quebec association of wood engravers. In 1976 the Musée d’art contemporain in Montreal showed her woodcuts under the collective title “La forêt”.

From 1971 to 1994 she taught at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières. There were public commissions too: works for the Palais de Justice in Longueuil, for the Desjardins and Pollack pavilions of Université Laval, for the Auditorium Stravinsky in Montreux. In 1989 she made stage panels for the Festival international de musique actuelle in Victoriaville, and in 1995 for Philippe Saire’s choreography “Palindrome” in Lausanne.

After 2000 Simonin returned to canvas and painted in acrylic, usually in very large formats. The titles of her late series, “Les jardins”, “Falaises du nord”, “Lac Léman”, “Équinoxes”, suggest to my mind that landscape occupied her more and more in these years. She received the prize of the Fondation Irène Reymond (1986), the Grand Prix Beaux-Arts of the Fondation vaudoise pour la culture (1990) and the prize of the Fondation Monique et Robert Parizeau for her contribution to the history of printmaking in Quebec. Her works are held by the Bibliothèque et Archives nationales du Québec, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, the Fondation Pierre Gianadda in Martigny, the cantonal museum of fine arts in Sion and the Bibliothèque nationale de France.

In her last years she worked in Montreal and in Évian-les-Bains. Francine Simonin died in Montreal on 9 October 2020, a week after her eighty-fourth birthday.