Clément Bérini

Artist, Educator, Leader

Unpublished text by Lise B. L. Goulet, conceived and written as part of the History of French Ontario course given by Mr. Paul-François Sylvestre in the fall of 2011 at the Collège Boréal Campus in Toronto.

Introduction

“Clément Bérini chose to pursue a career as an artist in Northern Ontario, a region where the resources available to him were limited. With considerable effort, he managed to produce a work worthy of critical interest and he became a model for other aspiring artists of the North."(Spadafore: 2000: p. 9)

Clément Bérini, for those who knew him was an original, a caring mentor and a passionate artist. Ingenious and curious, his journey was rich in twists and turns even though he lived in a small town in the boreal forest of northern Ontario. His dynamic presence, his constant humor, his vision of a better world through collaborative work and his tireless energy in creative work make him an unforgettable personality. Many were the people for whom he was an "accessible" role model, to use the current pedagogical jargon, that is, a benevolent mentor, quite himself, down to earth and welcoming to the other. He was curious, had a good sense of humor, and rarely spoke of himself. Driven to reflection and contemplation, convincing lobby for the rights of artists, opinionated but insightfully so, art he said, was art only if the product and the process that designed it led to self-expression. And personal expression was the path to self-enlightenment and self-fulfillment. "Whether as an artist, teacher or facilitator, Bérini sought to grow on a personal level and to contribute to society in everything he did. The esteem he continues to be shown by all who knew him provides us with the measure of his success. ” (Ibid: p. 41)

Work of the artist

Clément Bérini (1930-1996) stood out from all the artists of northern Ontario because, in the 1950s, he had received academic training from a master himself trained at the Royal Academy of Arts of Rome. Indeed, Alphonse Lespérance, born of a modest French-Canadian family in Montréal, was Clément Bérini “guru”.

Unlike the great social and aesthetic revolutions that shook Montréal in the 1940s and 1950s, Bérini followed in the wake of his master, whose academic manner long kept him apart from the artistic avant-garde. Clément Bérini's mature style "embodies a spiritual odyssey that caught him in his youth" (ibid: p. 9) and early religious imagery, inspired by the Renaissance and Greco-Roman tradition, although predominant, was abandoned during the 1960s and 1970s without setting aside the figurative language that gave it shape.

During the 1960s, the young artist discovered Georges Rouault and, with him, modern art. Impressed by the pathos that emerges from this artist’s work, Bérini realizes the potential of the elements and principals of design as a mean or pathway to expressiveness, a goal he sought. But abandoning the literal representation of the subject was not without an internal struggle. And the challenge was so great that Bérini finally decided to "keep the form while transcending it". (ibid: p. 10)

To achieve this, the influence of Der Blaue Reiter was decisive in terms of color and that of the Orphists and Synchronists even more. Infused with their sciences, Bérini's work gradually freed itself from the constraints of realism to update itself in a diaphanous symphony of pigment while revealing a stylized image, "calm and sublimated" (ibid: p. 10), symbolic of the spiritual in art, far from the socio-political and aesthetic concerns of the end of the millennium.

Bérini's work is pictorial (oil painting) but three-dimensional work is also part of his “répertoire”. Mural work, arts and crafts, graphic and architectural work mark, at one time or another, the artist's career. The artist's landmarks or references were manifold, he had an impressive collection of art books and slides from the collections of the many museums he had visited.

His work adorns the walls of various public places (eg, in Timmins: Thériault High School, Timmins Regional Hospital, L’Armise Restaurant, La Ronde Cultural Center) and the homes of individuals in Ontario and Québec.

Biographical Notes

Clément Joseph Bérini was born in Timmins on February 25, 1930 to Blanche Gauthier and Joseph Berini. Her mother was a French-Canadian native of Buckingham who, along with so many others, had embarked on the exodus to New Ontario, the promised land at the turn of the 20th century. As a teacher, she had learned to manage working conditions under Regulation 17, an affront to the francophone population of Ontario, without accepting the concept. The artist's father was from Taino, a small village just outside of Verona in the province of Como in Italy. Since his departure from Fort William (now Thunder Bay), a town on Lake Superior where his family had settled upon his arrival in Canada in 1888, Joseph had acquired a solid experience of miner's work after which he became a prospector. Eventually he went into partnership with two others to exploit what would become the Vimy Gold mine not far from Timmins. Subsequently, he co-owned the "Timmin's Garage" and later owned a vulcanization business which would flourish. The artist's parents met in Timmins: this serious and mature couple whose marriage today is described as exogamous had six children: Thérèse, Jean-Paul, Marcelle, Moïse, Clément and Jean-Charles.

Clément Bérini therefore comes from a well to do and deeply Catholic family and where French and English are spoken. The artist's father came from a gentile family who, impoverished by war, were forced to find a better future in Canada. But with the context being what it was then, young Joseph had been quickly assimilated to the dominant culture of his adopted country and province and spoke only English as an adult. However, when the time came to send his own children to school he sent them all to the then government-subsidized French-language school until Grade 8 in Timmins. This was not the case for high school, however as "high school" was only offered in English in Ontario. This is why all of the Berini children continued their studies in boarding schools in Ontario or Québec. Clément was sent to the Juniorat du Sacré-Coeur, today part of the University of Ottawa. It was there that he “awakened to art, both in its practical and aesthetic dimensions [in addition to absorbing] a sense of social justice and commitment to the community [that the Oblates,] missionaries in the service of the underprivileged… ” (ibid: p. 12) will instill in their students. A lesson which, we will see, will find its way with the adolescent, the young adult and the man Bérini will become.

Years of training

In 1945, Clément Bérini went to Ottawa to begin his classical course at the Juniorat du Sacré-Coeur where Bérini himself said: I “have been influenced by the art associated with ancient history, Latin and Greek classes, and I began to equate beauty with the naturalistic style of classical Greek and Renaissance art…” (Spadafore: 1988: p. 36). But, soon, the too strict discipline of the school and his growing desire for the arts led him to ask his parents' permission to settle in Montréal to pursue studies in fine arts. Although reluctant to the idea, his parents granted him permission and, in September 1947, the aspiring artist went to Montréal where he enrolled at Studio Salette: he was 17 years old.

Salette, the master, was a graduate of the Académie de Lyon and employed artists to teach at his school, notably Alphonse Lespérance, a newcomer from Rome where the latter had spent ten years training in the art of restoration with Vatican artists who taught at the Royal Academy of Rome. He also specialized in portraiture and still life with renowned artists. It should be noted that previously in 1935, when Lespérance left for Italy, the future master of the aspiring artist had taken lessons at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal for two years with Charles Maillard. The latter, an enemy of avant-garde art, influenced Lespérance to take this aesthetic stance that, in turn, Clément Bérini adopted.

It was therefore with confidence that Bérini entered the newly created Stile Romano studio by Lespérance the following year (1948), which eventually led him to adopt a style of painting which he would only give up through diligent and constant experimental work and a certain amount of torment twenty years later. For two years the aspiring artist lent himself to the work "of composition, [of] color theory and [to] ... drawing of figures" (Spadafore: 2000: p. 15) as well as painting portraits and still lives, genres in which Lespérance excelled.

In the fall of 1950, Bérini returned to Montréal to apprentice with his master who had just opened a business in churche restoration work. As is the tradition of the "apprentice" in the Middle Ages, Clément Bérini will live with his master and, by the same token, he will reconnect with the culture of his paternal ancestors. In the Lespérance home French and Italian are spoken. He will be a part of the family for the next four years and will maintain a bond of deep friendship with it until his death.

For four years, therefore, “he received an intensive technical training: he learned to draw and prepare patterns, to mix and match colors, gilding and marbling surfaces as well as restore wood and marble objects. " (Ibid: p 18) At the end of this training, the Québec Ministry of Labor awards him the diploma confirming the acquisition of his skills. The following year, in 1955, he became the foreman of Lespérance where the supervision of the restoration works and the workers, as well as carrying out part of this work, negotiating contracts and budgets with clients occupy most of his time, skills that will be solid assets throughout his professionnal life. Most of the employment contracts are acquired in Québec and a few others in Ontario.

Between employment contracts, the artist returns to Timmins where he divides his time between the family home and a makeshift cabin he built on land bought by his father not far from Nighthawk Lake. The annual clearing, maintaining a garden, painting for himself (portraits, themes related to bohemian life, still life) and some commissions (e.g., pair of commemorative paintings of the Jesuit martyrs massacred in Huronia in 1649 (commissioned by Father Breen, pastor of the Church of the Saints-Martyres-Canadiens in Iroquois Falls), occupy his time.

Far from the vitality of the metropolis, Bérini fights isolation by joining the local theater group directed by Vita and Cecil Linder, for which he produces stage sets. He attends the concerts of the Jeunesses musicales, Bérini was also a classical music lover all his life. The artist also offers his services to the Dante Club where cultural events are organized for the Italian community. Later, Clément would take care of the sets for the Timmins Symphony Orchestra, which hosts a major concert every year. The work will be done with several volunteers and will become, from 1987 to 1994, an artistic activity of recurring collaboration. He will also offer his services to Saint-Antoine Cathedral, where a committee of volunteers supported by the artist meets weekly to prepare the banners of the week. It was therefore very early and until the end of his life that Bérini became involved in the community to, in most cases, donate his expertise and leadership.

Years of Research and Experimentation

The Montréal adventure was drawing to a close because, in 1960, faced with the competition he faced, Lespérance closed shop. Bérini is not sure what to expect. A tragedy in the family of his sister, Marcelle, immediately brought him to Ottawa, where, for a year or so, he provided her with the support she needed to recover from the work accident that claimed the life of her husband Armand Goulet and left her with two small children to raise. Marcelle decides to keep the newly purchased house and Clément transforms it into an income house: he adorns several walls of the main apartment with his landscapes and decorative motifs as he painted them in churches.

In 1963, J. Conrad Lavigne, offered him the position of artistic director at CFCL Television that this young entrepreneur, who would gain in stature over the years, had opened in 1956 in Timmins. The working environment in which Bérini finds himself resembles in many ways that of the previous decade. Indeed, “… his responsibilities consist of supervising the assistants, creating the station's graphic signature and advertising graphics, designing props for shows and newscasts and producing special effects. ”(Ibid: p. 22)

In a business which was in its infancy and with a limited budget, the skills acquired by Bérini were put to great use. In addition, this work environment gave free rein to the inventive and creative nature of the artist, which he appreciated.

In his spare time, the artist seeks a way of painting that can meet his need for personal expression. He continues in the same line of portraits and still lives by adding the landscape. Towards the end of the 1960s he turned to non-figurative language, the experimentation of which confirmed to him that he was, first and foremost, a figurative painter.

Cultural "Boom" in French Ontario

When Bérini suddenly lost his job at CFCL in the early 1970s, it coincided with the cultural boom in French Ontario and the start, a few years earlier, of the creation of a series of cultural centers across the province. The Francophone Affairs office of the Ontario Arts Council (CAO) had been set up and one of its agents is subsidizing In-Média-Opération-Ressources, a training program for cultural facilitators. Bérini follows this training, the aim of which was to teach various techniques to local artists who, in turn, would train members of their communities.

The founders of the La Ronde Cultural Center, whose vision was to make it a point of contact for Francophones in Timmins corresponded to that of Bérini in the sense that the latter dreamed of creating an artistic community which, through the sales of its products at the boutique-gallery would ensure its vitality while anchoring the contribution of artists to the center. When Bérini is hired as a coordinator, he organizes the installation of the workshops and selects facilitators who will provide quality education to the entire community, young and old. The community enrolls in the workshops (pottery, weaving, sculpture, painting). The enthusiasm is overflowing and, soon, "… Action Jeunessse, a program where adolescents teach children under the supervision of adults trained by Bérini…" (ibid: p. 25), is born. Over a period of three years more than 200 young people are introduced to five artistic disciplines each summer.

La Ronde is also becoming a meeting place and voluntary work around a decoration project initiated by Bérini embellishes the meeting rooms. Huge decorative panels depict the activities of the city, and with good-humored work, gibes and more serious discussions this project quickly rallies the community around the cultural center.

The artist, reinvigorated by working with the Francophone community, is therefore greatly disillusioned when, a few years later, the management of the center begins to exercise increasing control over access to the workshops. While the artists worked there both day and night, we begin to lock the doors on a regime incompatible with the lifestyle and work of artists. The latter gradually left the center and, eventually, the workshops were dismantled. The management's incomprehension and the inevitable bankruptcy it caused the project of a strong and committed artistic community around La Ronde will remain for Bérini, a source of great bitterness.

From Galeries Éducatives to BRAVO

From the mid-1970s until the end of the 1980s Bérini divided his time between teaching and developing a mature work. He teaches visual arts at Thériault High School and continues to give private lessons in his studio and for Northern College in surrounding communities. He travels, visits major European collections, reflects, experiments and discovers a plastic path in which to embark. His trip to Germany in 1974 where he saw the works of Die Brücke and Der Blaue Reiter as well as the cubist-inspired paintings of Franz Marc and Lionel Feininger was decisive. Later, in 1978, the analysis of the exhibition catalog Synchronism and American Color Abstraction, shown at the Whitney Museum in New York, completed his research. Indeed, it was at the end of the 1970s that "Bérini's previously naturalistic style gave way entirely to abstraction" (ibid: p. 30).

The artist is involved in the organizing committee of the educational gallery of Thériault High School. This project, funded by the Office of the Bureau des affaires francophones of the OAC, since it is unique to Francophones, is intended for secondary school students and was born, in 1975, from an idea of Louise Latrémouille and Jean-Claude Bergeron, teachers of visual arts at De la Salle High School in Ottawa. "The project [...] consists of bringing French-speaking artists to schools to present, exhibit and sell their works". (Ibid: p. 27) As a whole, the project reinforces the demand for a coherent and caliber body of works on the part of the artists and, more specifically in densely populated areas where Francophones live, it builds the capacity for the organization and management of exhibitions.

In isolated communities in northern and southern Ontario as well as eastern Ontario (e.g., Algonquin High School in North Bay, Confederation High School in Welland, Hawkesbury Regional High School), the project is gaining momentum and popularity. On the student side, they are exposed to many artistic practices while rubbing shoulders with a variety of artists each year of their high school studies. And for the community, this not only made it possible to expose it to contemporary and current art from French-speaking canadian artists, especially from Ontario, but it also had the advantage of arousing and promoting, through the consumption of the artistic product, the idea and habit of collecting art.

Clément Bérini prepared to exhibit in the Galerie Éducative of Thériault High School and it was in November 1980 that he presented his first set of works "in his new prismatic style" (ibid: p. 32) to the general public. The success is immediate: the exhibition awaited by the community is presented in the form of themes including those of music and the sailboat. He took part in the project in 1982 and continued his career between group and solo exhibitions across the province but especially in northern Ontario (e.g., Ontario North Now Pavilion in Toronto 1982-85, École secondaire Louis- Riel in Gloucester in 1985, Timmins Museum: National Exhibition Center in 1982 and 1989, Emma Cotti Gallery in Iroquois Falls in 1992).

From the 1980s and until his death, he carried out large collective projects with students, first as part of the Artistes Créateurs dans les écoles, a OAC program (e.g. École secondaire André-Laurendeau in Ottawa v. 1983 and Louis-Riel to Gloucester v. 1984). He will accept a few invitations from other schools and communities, projects that will be funded in part or not by the OAC (e.g., Louis-Hémon Cultural Center in 1988, Jeanne-d'Arc Elementary School in Fauquier and Thériault High School in 1995).

In 1986, during annually recurrent francophone arts festival held in Sudbury called La nuit sur l’étange, tribute was paid to recognize the contribution of Clément Bérini. He receives the prestigious Prix du Nouvel-Ontario, "... an honor bestowed annually on a distinguished person in the arts. The tribute underlines the quality of Bérini's artistic production as well as his commitment and dedication to the Francophone artistic community. (Ibid: p. 33)

Perspective Huit, a multidisciplinary group founded in 1988 in northern Ontario, is made up of young visual artists, poets and songwriters who practice performance art, among other things. Bérini, always ready to support new initiatives and in particular those of the next generation, joins the group but is discreet in front of this mode of expression which is not his. Bérini attends all of the group's public presentations whose members “… perform in shopping malls, create sculptures from objects found in a Kirkland Lake mine and organize exhibitions-performances in restaurants in Kapuskasing and Hearst . " (Ibid: p. 36)

Thus, the group reaches a large public rather than the restricted one of exhibition events organized in galleries and it sets itself apart from the usual aesthetic issues in favor of social concerns to be denounced or promoted.

At the end of the 1980s, the Galeries Éducatives network was now overseen by Pro-Arts, a “… who has been volunteering in the service of French-speaking artists for six years…” (ibid: p. 36). When Pro-Arts disbanded to make way for the creation of the Bureau des Regroupements des Artistes Visuels de l'Ontario (BRAVO) in the fall of 1991, a page was turned in the way in which Francophone artists in Ontario developed and organize. And the pioneering work of the Galeries Éducatives and Pro-Arts network will have largely contributed to the take-off of BRAVO. Indeed, these two entities had opened the door to the possibility of a strong and engaged artistic community in French Ontario as early as 1975.

Position Statement and Lobby for the Arts

About forty delegates, including Clément Bérini, were part of the founding assembly of BRAVO in Toronto in November 1991. This arts service organization (non-governmental organization - NGO) in terms of promotion and dissemination is organized into four subsidiaries or regional offices: north, center-north, south-west and east. Each subsidiary is responsible for encouraging artists from its locality to join the group and to mobilize in terms of promotion and distribution.

Clément Bérini is not president of BRAVO-Nord but he is certainly its mentor and “… figurehead…” (ibid: p. 37) and it was in 1992 that the subsidiary decided to undertake a training-promotion-fundraising project: a portfolio made up of works by BRAVO-Nord members, in the form of serigraphs, will be produced and sold from the Thériault High School gallery. Normand Fortin from Kapuskasing was hired to give training in screen printing and the workshops at La Ronde were reserved for creative work. The works are drawn up at seventy-five and eight artists decide to participate in the project.

When government grants in the arts began to dry up in the early 1990s, artists would be pushed to protest and Bérini would join the demands. In 1991, the Minister of Culture and Communications of Ontario, Rosario Marchese, set up a study group to “… take stock of Franco-Ontarian culture and make recommendations to ensure its future.” (Ibid: p. 38) Bérini agreed to sit on the committee chaired by Yolande Grisé. The report will be titled: RSVP! Keys in Hand (RSVP! : Clefs en mains.).

The last years of Clément Bérini will be just as fruitful as the previous ones and, although he begins to feel the pangs of age, he persists and accepts, with Maurice Gaudreault and Colette Jacques (artists members of BRAVO-Nord), a City of Timmins project which consists of creating objects to give more interest to the galleries of a gold mine which will soon become a tourist attraction. He enrolled in ceramics classes at Northern College where he produced a series of requiem-themed pieces. He continues his community and educational work in schools. He is preparing his exhibition, his latest, entitled Les orgues de la Saint-Sylvestre for the Emma Cotti Gallery in Iroquois Falls: the works are produced on doors that will be suspended from the ceiling in the form of an installation. He explains to journalist Dave Hunt that: “These works are a throwback to the days when I was restoring churches. It was not uncommon that at the same time we were carrying out our renovations, work was going on on the organ, and we found ourselves surrounded by a sea of pipes.” (Ibid: p. 38-39) This is how the work of Clément Bérini ends, both with a return to the sources and a new beginning since this way of presenting works, this installation, stood out from all the exhibitions he had until now carried out.

Finally, his concern to engage the community through collaborative work and his unwavering support for young people and the next generation make Clément Bérini a personality of stature: to use the pedagogical language of the Ministry of Education in terms of cultural approach education, Clément Bérini is indeed a “… cultural reference [a “must” in French Ontario art, certainly the]… cultural landmark…” (Ministry of Education: 2009: p. 24 ) of all who knew him.

Conclusion

Clément Bérini will have renewed himself until his last breath, he went from easel painting to installation at the age of sixty-two. His journey from naturalism to abstraction was not without clashes and torments but, through research and work, he developed an aesthetic language that freed him from realism and propelled his work into the realm of innovation. His diaphanous and stylized, calm and sublimated images are unique and the result of a solid training, a rigor of the practice and the desire for self-accomplishment and self-fulfillment through art. In addition, Clément Bérini is also the product of a French-speaking education committed both language and social issues: he will engage in all initiatives that promote and lobby for the development of culture, language and arts in French Ontario. In his own community, he will be a dynamic facilitator, knowledgeable educator and caring mentor. The energy and passion displayed in everything he undertook, the welcoming of others and the care he put in his work as an educator make him a model not only accessible but also, well loved by those around him. Equally appreciated by the English-speaking community that surrounded him and with whom he worked and collaborated, the model of the exogamous couple formed by his parents had a lot to do with it. Indeed, accustomed to the two official languages and to two cultures, he will never have deny them but, rather, celebrate them. Clément Bérini: Artist, Educator, Leader.

Bibliography

Ministry of l’Éducation. (2009). Une approche culturelle de l’enseignement pour l’appropriation de la culture dans les écoles de langue française de l’Ontario. Cadre d’orientation et d’intervention. Imprimeur de la Reine pour l’Ontario. Toronto. 81 pages.

Spadafore. Anita, L. (1988). Synchromies in Yellow, Blue and Violet: an interview with Clément Bérini in Northward Journal. No 45. Page 36.

Spadafore. Anita, L. (2000). A Spiritual Odyssey / Une odyssée spirituelle. Timmins Museum National Exhibition Center, South Porcupine, Ontario. 120 pages.

Farmer, Diane (1996) "Artisans de la modernité. Les centres culturels en Ontario français" Les presses de l’Université d’Ottawa. Collection Amérique française. 239 pages.

Goulet, Lise (2007) Proposition pour que Clément Bérini devienne membre honoraire de BRAVO. Annexe au procès-verbal de l’AGA de BRAVO tenue à Mattawa au Centre écologique canadien le 10 juin 2007

Sylvestre, Paul-François (2006) "Création d’un groupe de travail pour une politique culturelle" dans Les Hiers de l’Express de Toronto.

French Ontario Museum of Visual Arts

http://mavof.org/clement-berini/