Galerie MËL: Two Artists Who Forge the Raw Material of My Novel

I like drinking from every kind of art form. Music, dance, visual art...

I'm writing a story that sits comfortably inside the big science fiction family. I'm not married to SF for all that; I could just as easily write a contemporary cozy tomorrow morning, historical fiction next week, or retro adventure in the Bob Morane vein three months from now. Except that the project I'm on right now, the one that demands all my time and all my creative energy — Seven Drifts — is science fiction through and through. (Or maybe a delectable mix?) But anyway, SF is what I read most as a teenager, so... right. Great. Which doesn't stop me from reading Alexander McCall Smith now and then, or Gabriel García Márquez, Patricia Smart or Michelle Lenormand. Nor does it stop me from geeking out over pottery, say, or over visual art in general...

Or from spending a few afternoons feasting on the work hanging at Galerie MËL.

My wife runs on visual art. Because of her, I explore more widely and wander outside my comfort zones, and I keep finding artists who fascinate me and inspire me endlessly. Because of her, I get into much more direct contact with those artists. It's wonderful. My writing will only be richer for it, and so will the rest of my life.

At Galerie MËL, we discover two exceptional artists: Melsa Montagne and Nathanaël Major. And all at once, the loop closes. Their work brushes right up against the science fiction I loved as a teenager.

Melsa Montagne does it with figures larger than life, on immense wood panels, and with an aesthetic that can't help but remind me of Enki Bilal, a celebrated French comics artist I admire enormously; and with her themes, and her palette; with the sheer force with which her subjects' inner lives come through. I love it. Work that hits. One glance and you're caught. I wish I'd known about her sooner — I'd have gone to see the solo show she held at La TOHU all summer, Bêtes de foire, la forêt de nos différences. I think I'd have completely capoté, as we say around here.

From the sidewalk, before you even walk into Galerie MËL, Nathanaël Major's life-size sculptures catch your attention. Figures, articulated or not, metallic and coloured, dreamlike, a warning of what's waiting inside.

Once past the threshold, Melsa Montagne welcomes us and shows us around. Nathanaël Major joins us shortly after, straight out of his workshop at the back. On the way through I say hello to Marc Gosselin, another exhibiting artist, in to touch up a piece. I'd noticed his work in one of the good cafés in Hochelaga-Maisonneuve: a singular vision of the Jacques-Cartier bridge, rendered three-dimensional in wool thread.

We climb to the upper floor of the old garage on rue de Rouen, attached to a former dairy, itself folded into Galerie MËL...

And I stop dead, open-mouthed, in front of Nathanaël Major's post-apocalyptic sculptures.

Cold-worked metal; tortured steel in a dozen shades of ochre, which I'm particularly fond of; arid, burnt ground, artifacts rising out of rough earth, hammer-struck and scorched by the oxidation of corten steel... This work absolutely floors me. A steeple here, an astronomy tower there with an astrolabe inside it, every detail pulling irresistibly at my curiosity. A full Gothic cathedral erupts from the back wall, a DeLorean from the opposite one, mid-collision with a monolith out of the far end of space and time. Then a single boot, lost, alone. A chair. A pocket watch — broken. A Greek temple — swallowed by the corroded earth. A forest — burnt. A mountain of books — ready for the pyre. A figure — struggling up out of the scorched ground. I spot the Death Star trench too — the very one where Luke Skywalker, at the controls of his X-wing, finally switched off his targeting computer and put his whole trust in the Force. And then, closer to home, a canoe, a violin...

I'm left speechless by the sheer scale of Nathanaël Major's work, and by the minute detail of it. That's the sculptor's job: blacksmith, engineer, architect and goldsmith, all at once. On my way back down the stairs, it struck me that this also sounds a lot like the job description of someone who builds a world from scratch. A novelist, say.

But what I really carried home with me wasn't the steel itself so much as the feel of that steel put to the torture. In a space city adrift for two centuries — the one where my novel Seven Drifts takes place — there isn't much that's new: everything is recycled, repaired, reused, sometimes freshly redone, often half in ruins. That is exactly the material Nathanaël Major sculpts. A lost boot. A chair. Ochre and oxidation. At Galerie MËL, I spent an hour standing in front of the raw material of my book.

And that goes as much for Melsa Montagne's figures as for Nathanaël Major's sculptures: young faces that have already lived a great deal.

And it keeps resonating elsewhere. Since I let myself fall into the world of comics this summer, I'm struck by how much Nathanaël Major's work sends me back into a parallel universe I'm already travelling through in the book I happen to be reading the very day I visit Galerie MËL: Silent Jenny, by Mathieu Bablet, the final volume of a science fiction trilogy; the story takes place aboard mobile cities wandering a sterile Earth. Cities adrift... I swear I didn't arrange any of this with the set designer! (The first two volumes, Shangri-La and Carbon & Silicon, have been available in English for years; Silent Jenny is due from Magnetic Press later this year.)

Still. Science fiction — once it has you, it has you.

Melsa Montagne and Nathanaël Major founded Galerie MËL three years ago. They're marking the anniversary with a collective exhibition running from September 5 to 27, 2026.

Opening reception September 5, 3 p.m. to 9 p.m.

If you happen to be orbiting somewhere over North America in the coming weeks or months, don't miss the chance to dive down to Galerie MËL. (You know where Montréal is, right? Just there, north of the Gulf of Mexico, a little east of Lake Ontario...) Come and see the work of Melsa Montagne and Nathanaël Major, and of the artists showing alongside them. Better yet, take home a piece or two, large format or smaller, before they all go like hot cakes. Your life will be a hundred times richer for it.

Galerie MËL 3140 rue de Rouen, Montréal, QC, H1W 1K6

Métro Préfontaine

Open Friday to Sunday, 1:30 p.m. to 6 p.m.

Melsa Montagne is a Montreal visual artist who stands out for her figurative, often unsettling paintings exploring the complexities of the human condition. Her instinctive style mixes acrylic, pastel, ink and collage to create expressive, anonymous portraits that evoke deep emotional truths.

Recent and notable exhibitions

• Bêtes de foire, la forêt de nos différences: a solo show in the exhibition hall at La TOHU (2345 rue Jarry Est), exploring uniqueness and human difference through figurative portraiture.

• Maison de la culture du Plateau-Mont-Royal: featured in a collective exhibition that ran until August 2026.

• Galerie MËL: her work, and unsold pieces from past exhibitions, are regularly available at the gallery, 3140 rue de Rouen, in Hochelaga, Montreal.

Nathanaël Major is a Montreal sculptor known for his metalwork and its refined finishes. His oxidized steel pieces belong to singular narrative universes. According to EtOH Brasserie, the artistic work behind his main series represents a dilapidated, dystopian version of the world.

He has taken part in several collective exhibitions at Galerie MËL in Montreal over the course of 2026.

Recent exhibitions (2026)

• MINIATURE 3 (July – August 2026): a summer collective exhibition at Galerie MËL, with a closing reception in August.

• Nostalgie (March – April 2026): a collective exhibition exploring the aesthetics and memories of the 1970s through the 1990s, bringing together numerous local creators.