Howdy!

I’ve always been fascinated by Horloge solaire by André Mongeau. According to the Palais des congrès’ website “a laser beam makes the color of the fibers change according to the sun’s intensity.” That would have been so cool, if it ever worked…

Plucking from L’Action (a weekly newspaper published in Joliette), he’s an artist

Ses œuvres cherchent à traduire l’essentiel. Peintre-architecte de l’espace cosmique, il crée par une myriade de points, colorés et lumineux comme autant d’étoiles dans l’univers, une constellation de signes qui invitent à partager une magie sombre et étincelante, silencieuse et féerique.^*

Or if you prefer in The King’s English; His works seek to capture the essence. Painter and architect of cosmic space, it creates a myriad of points, colorful and bright like stars in the universe, a constellation of signs that invite you to share a dark magic and sparkling, quiet and magical. [machine translated by Google, it does a wonderful job on artists’ statements]

As far as I know it was built as part of the first phase of the Palais des congrès way back in the 1980s. Given that at the time the city was going bonkers for Melvin Charney‘s work, and the supports are rather genericly thin struts of steel, I for the longest time, thought that Mr. Charney had in fact made it. But I was very wrong. And doing a little more Googling on M. Mongeau, it appears that he lives in the wonderfully named town of Sainte-Émélie-de-l’Énergie.

And as far as I can tell, the current overlords of the Palais des congrès don’t even like it anymore, as this picture taken on axis from the Palais des congrès looking towards Complexe Guy Favreau shows, they have strategically placed trees in the way, so you can’t see it.

I vaguely remember seeing it working once, a long, long time ago.