Unveiling the Submerged Landscape of Chaboillez: Revealing a Forgotten Hidden World
Montreal's Buried Past Uncovered in Artwork by Étienne Prud'homme
In a captivating fusion of urban tapestry and graphic poem, Montreal-based author and artist Étienne Prud'homme unveils the historic layers hidden beneath the city's asphalt in his latest work, "Sous les eaux de Chaboillez." The novel delves into the forgotten history of the Chaboillez Square, a former metropolitan hub now known as Griffintown.
Prud'homme assumes the roles of poet, draftsman, and archaeologist of memory in this remarkable piece. He resurrects the ghosts of a place at the crossroads of three suburbs, presenting them in a fluid, almost dreamlike composition. The visual backdrop is Montreal's chiaroscuro, both disenchanted and inhabited, with familiar figures like Charles-Séraphin Rodier emerging from the shadows.
The Chaboillez Square gazes back at the reader with two centuries of history. From colonial days to the contemporary era of concrete, Prud'homme anchors each page in a distant yet mobile timeline. The past surges like a hallucination, fiction flirts with lived experience. The work rests on a daring visual architecture inspired by period engravings and composed of monochrome ink drawings.
The illustrations evoke the somber breath of Gustave Doré and the nostalgic precision of Jacques Tardi, from whom Prud'homme draws beautiful influences. In this sumptuous chronicle, water becomes a metaphor for forgetting and submerged memories.
"Sous les eaux de Chaboillez" resurrects an erased past, not just as a mere piece of land named after its first owner, Louis Chaboillez, but also as a fully-fledged character nourished by its successive incarnations. The narrative resists linearity, like the territory it evokes, made of meanders, ruins, and reconstructions.
Prud'homme, born in 1987, continues a singular artistic trajectory begun with "Bienvenue les profondeurs," a work that likewise crosses genres, using watercolors and incantatory prose to sketch the funeral portrait of an industrial city in its death throes. With each new work, he confirms his place among the most originalvoices in Quebec comics, those who delve beneath the surface to uncover stories that no one else tells.
The book offers a compelling narrative that simultaneously educates readers about Montreal's history and provides a visual feast for the eyes, making the city's often overlooked past accessible through a unique blend of art and narrative.
The book, "Sous les eaux de Chaboillez," showcases how culture and lifestyle from different eras have shaped Montreal's home-and-garden, as Étienne Prud'homme breathes life into a forgotten square, merging historical facts with artistic flair. Each vivid page in the novel mirrors the city's changing lifestyle as it transforms from colonial days to the contemporary era, blending memories of the past with the reality of the present.
