Roland Poulin Sculpture

Patricia Morley is professor emerita of English and Canadian studies at
Concordia University, Japan Foundation Fellow 1991-92, and the author of
Margaret Laurence: The Long Journey Home and As Though Life Mattered:
Leo Kennedy’s Story.

This is an exhibition catalogue of Canada’s important modern
sculptors. Roland Poulin was awarded the first Prix Ozias-Leduc, created
in 1992 to honor visual artists.

In her foreword, NGC Director Shirley L. Thomson praises his
“deceptively simple structures” of cement and painted wood. An essay
by Donald Kuspit praises “the paradox of death” in Poulin’s
sculpture, while Diana Nemiroff explores his “visual contradictions
and paradoxical meanings.”

Most of the volume is devoted to the exhibition works. Often untitled,
they are shown in black and white, and also in warm, brown-toned
photographs. Poulin’s personal comments on the origins of a work or on
what it means to him are welcome additions.

These studies in pure form, shaped by Poulin’s feeling for mass and
for light and shadow, are difficult works with which viewers must
struggle to come to terms.