Echoes of Montréal: The Art of Goulet

By Levy Barragán

Through her work, Canadian artist Stephanie Goulet invites us to look again at the vibrant city of Montréal—this time through her own gaze, one that reveals how nature reclaims its space within the urban landscape, where the grey of metal and concrete beats alongside the presence of endemic creatures: owls, birds, hawks, pigeons, snow geese, herons, coyotes, and dogs. Presences that so often go unnoticed in the rhythm of everyday life become protagonists in a narrative that reminds us: life always finds its place, even in the midst of the city’s chaos.

Beauty lies in the eye that sees it

When contemplating the piece Echoes de Montréal, this phrase feels truer than ever. How many times have we caught ourselves by staring at the ground as we walk, missing out on an inspiring visual adventure? Goulet reminds us to lift our heads and explore the city with a renewed gaze, where the colours of life emerge from within the grey of concrete and metal.

Montréal, a vibrant city

Echoes de Montréal is a pictorial work that celebrates, as she describes it:

“The meeting of two breaths – Two languages, two materials, two eras.

Between stone and life, stillness and movement,

The city awakens and remembers.

Montréal breathes through light and memory,

In a whisper only echoes can hear”

Looking closely at her paintings, we are invited to reflect on “what this monument would be without the bird fluttering around it.” This thought brought to mind Oscar Wilde’s The Happy Prince, in which the swallow converses with the statue, helping it fulfill its purpose. In this intertextuality that every artwork generates with its viewer, a dialogue emerges—a space where echoes and whispers carry us back to other times and places we have lived and perhaps forgotten.

For example, when I saw her painting The Little Pink House, I remembered the first time—three years ago—when I was biking along the Lachine Canal on my way to the Old Port. I looked up and had to stop, captivated once again by that pink little house with flowers in its windows, perched atop old metal beams and rusted staircases. I remember smiling and thinking: “This is something absolutely surreal.”

Another of her pieces, The Fox’s Curiosity, made me think of the fox searching for a friend in The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry.

And so, as I moved through her exhibition Echoes de Montréal, I was reminded that we always have the chance to look twice at the same scene to discover details we may have overlooked.

To inhabit Montréal and experience it through a gaze that never tires of discovering the beauty of this vibrant, multicultural city—one full of life and art—is precisely what Goulet’s work invites us to do.

www.gouletart.com