Gaudi lecture explores Christian imagination in art

Theopolis is launching its inaugural Gaudí Lecture at the University of Toronto on Oct. 24, bringing along liturgical artist Jonathan Pageau to help examine the place of the Christian imagination in contemporary art.

The inaugural installation of a soon-to-be annual lecture is intended to act as a quasi “public defence” of the importance and continued relevance of the Christian imagination in Canada, while creating an open forum for conversations around faith, art and culture. 

Eden O’Brien, executive director and co-founder of the Theopolis Project, said the organization hopes the event will contribute to a growing interest in Catholic arts and culture and help build a similar conversation in Canada. That fits with Theopolis' mission: to revive Catholic art in our communities.“This is a way for us to provide a way into that rising activity and growing interest in Catholic cultural points, which we’ve seen in things like Ascension Presents. This has been a vision of ours for a while, and we landed on this large, fairly formal event with a great speaker and space for great discussion,” she said. 

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Pageau, a renowned liturgical artist, writer and public speaker, will lecture on “the Christian Imagination and the Question of Autonomous Art,” hoping to explore what happens when art becomes separated from worship, faith and a broader cultural tradition. As O’Brien explains, that separation risks cutting artists off from a two-millennia-old Christian tradition of symbols, stories and ideas that have since helped shape Western art and culture as we know it. 

“The Catholic Church has served as one of the greatest patrons of the arts of all time, and many of the great works of Western art were founded or funded by the Church. Even on the imagination side, the kind of legendarium which the Christian faith offers the imagination of the artist is related to the development of Western culture and the arts,” O'Brien said, touching on the separation of art from the Christian imagination and how it could mean losing access to that enormous historical tradition. 

More important perhaps, O'Brien argues, is that the lecture’s topic of Christian imagination is something ubiquitous in Western and Canadian culture. Even attendees who don't consciously think about Christianity or Christian art have inherited a culture shaped by it.

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“So while there might be a bit of a learning curve with some of the content that's presented for a non-art-oriented audience member, I do think that because these themes and the problems we're dealing with draw on an absence that we can all feel — an absence of meaning — this lecture will resonate with all people,” she said. 

The lecture takes its name from Antoni Gaudí, the renowned Spanish architect and designer perhaps best known for his work on Barcelona’s Sagrada Família basilica. For the Theopolis team, he represents a particularly visionary form of a desired explanation of Christian imagination, having combined something traditional in the cathedral with his own distinctive and imaginative artistic vision.

Hopeful for upwards of 250 attendees to join at the university’s Northrop Frye Hall, O’Brien is optimistic for an afternoon where patrons don’t simply arrive to hear Pageau’s lecture, but meet, talk and participate with one another as part of a larger conversation about faith, arts and culture in Canada. 

“ We have always been interested in being intentional about active participation in the areas we are interested in, in this case, breaking open the understanding of the Canadian imagination,” she said. 

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“ Regardless of someone's background or how much they know about art, this is a great opportunity to meet hundreds of other people who are interested in not just faith, but arts and culture, and really starting a conversation around it in our province.” 

For more information and registration details, visit https://www.theopolis.ca/gaudi-lecture//.