Rober Racine is a visual artist, writer, pianist, composer and performer. He has taught from time to time at the Université de Montréal (1985) and in the Theatre department of the Université du Québec à Montréal (1991, 1993). His transpositions of words into music, images and gestures have been exhibited around the world. In addition to receiving accolades for his work in literature, he has been a recipient of the Prix Louis-Comtois (1998), the Prix Ozias-Leduc (1999) and the Prix Paul-Émile Borduas. His masterful installations lead smoothly from one to the other, in particular Le terrain du dictionnaire A/Z, Les Pages-Miroirs and Dessins des Pages-Miroirs, each acting as a springboard to the next. His focus on displaced and reintegrated words began in the early 1980s when he used a blade to extract 55,000 words from the 1979 edition of Le Petit Robert dictionary. The result was 2,130 pages full of small incisions marking the empty spaces left by each extraction. The remaining definitions would serve as a basic framework for the piece that followed and later be embellished with annotations, underlining and so on. Parc de la langue française is a work currently in development that will allow visitors to move around all of the dictionary’s words and definitions as though they were walking through a garden.
SEE:
« Rober Racine… : Portrait de l’artiste en allé » by Serge Fisette, ESPACE, vol. 6, n° 1, p. 42.
« Des histoires en écho » by Gilles Daigneault, ESPACE #74, p. 19.
« Radicality explained to children… Oops! Excuse the slip of the tongue… artists! » by Nicolas Mavrikakis & Laurent Vernet Stein, ESPACE #98, p. 9.
