Espace Adélard Saison 2021 poster

Espace Adélard is an artist residency offering an immersive experience for artists in the city of Frelighsburg, Canada. Artists are invited to work on their projects while at the same time engaging with the local community – whether it’s school children, merchants, or any part of the population – around workshops and discussions about art. The name of the gallery is an homage to Adélard Godbout, Québec’s prime minister in the 1940s, who was an agronomist and took several progressive measures including the right to vote for women and mandatory schooling for children from age 6. As he grew up in Frelighsburg, the idea came quite naturally to associate the name Adélard to this artistic space, a name that evokes a care for nature, patrimony and education.

For the 2021 season, Espace Adélard commissioned Jolin Masson to design their program poster. The gray background enhances the colorful paintings by this year’s residents, making it a sober yet poetic informative poster. We find this elegant sobriety in the use of Newsreader from Production Type and Cabinet Grotesk from Indian Type Foundry. Newsreader was designed by Hugues Gentile and Jean-Baptiste Levée with the idea of a typeface for text on screen and long-form reading, which brings a bookish aspect to the typeface for its text versions, as used in this poster. Cabinet Grotesk, on the other hand, is a contemporary sans with a slight contrast, a typeface that has personality without taking center stage. Both of the font families are open-source [edit: Newsreader is open-source, Cabinet Grotesk is free for commercial use, but not open-source, see comments]. Another thing they have in common is the subtle design: brought together, they create a form of sophisticated simplicity in the poster that make its design “evident”. This obviousness suits Espace Adélard: a place where artists take the time to work on their art, and where art isn’t sacralized by the institution.