From Automatisme to Automation by Dr. Nicola Tullio Pezolet

In this essay, Nicola Pezolet revisits the complex legacies of the iconic “light fresco” by Québécois artist Jean-Paul Mousseau (1927–1991), situated in the entrance lobby of the Hydro-Québec headquarters in downtown Montreal (designed by the modernist architect Gaston Gagnier, 1906–1982). He pays special attention to the underlying Catholic dimensions of Mousseau’s education and art practice (and the critical reception of his various light works), and, more broadly, the various connections between culture, art, religion and the mass media in Quebec at the turn of the 1960s.