Vue Portuaire 

Curator: Here we have "Vue Portuaire" an undated oil painting by Pierre-Jacques Pelletier. Pelletier seems to capture a bustling port scene with the impressionistic style of his contemporaries. Editor: The grey, hazy atmosphere kind of gets to you, right? There's something melancholic but very alive about the scene. I imagine the air smells of salt and tar. It almost makes me want to light a cigarette, even though I quit ages ago. Curator: It does seem Pelletier was engaging in the trend of the era for the impressionists to go en plein air to experience, represent, and often reimagine modernity as it was unfolding, though not as radical perhaps as a Monet. Here we get boats and figures going about their business in a busy port, but it is somehow softened, not so severe as city life could often be. Editor: It's almost like he is capturing the port at the cusp of its transformation from sail to steam. The ships' riggings are tangled but there is a tugboat belching some kind of thick smoke. And the colours... very subdued. It's very evocative. He has distilled a complex environment to something very essential. Curator: Subdued perhaps to us now. However, paintings such as these began as challenges to what was deemed aesthetically acceptable at the time. To think such art was once considered beyond the pale makes you consider the politics of image making and its constant flux through our history. Editor: Exactly, that's what art is about. Not just beauty, but wrestling with how we see. I keep coming back to those tiny figures ambling about the quay, are they happy, are they tired? They make me feel connected to a time and space I've never known, it feels oddly intimate, and slightly sad... I don't know. Curator: A valid point to make, as art allows us to make an imaginative connection between present and past, artist and audience, image and reality. Editor: So well put. Art, in that case, becomes time travel of sorts. It lets us wander the docks, even if they're veiled in the mists of yesterday. Thank you for allowing me to be guided into Pelletier's world today, it has been more exciting than I expected.