Letter of Intent

Born in Montreal in 1984, I graduated from Concordia University with distinction in studio art with a minor in ceramics and then graduated from the Haute Ecole d'Art et Design de Genève in painting. I taught for a few years, made puppets for Swiss companies, then since the end of 2020, I decided to devote myself fully to painting. I have been painting since I was 12 and it is really the medium that gives me the most freedom as it is complete and complex. Painting, by the fact that we produce everything from A to Z, gives me a lot of freedom and suits me because of its complexity as there are so many formal and philosophical choices to make. However, I like to create objects and I also appreciate the spontaneity of drawing.

I grew up in Montreal in a very eclectic city where we advocate comprehensibility, efficiency and the idea that anything can be possible if we give ourselves the means. I migrated when I was 20 to live in France and study in Switzerland. Three different countries, three cultures but only one spoken language which is used differently but which with a small effort of abstraction can be understood by all.

Being dyslexic and having a very arboreal thought system, surely exacerbated by the Quebec culture which uses words in a very colorful way, I have a particular way of expressing myself. I constantly mix expressions, make a lot of slips of the tongue, still often invent words. Language represents for me a struggle and a fascination, a kind of openness to our perception of the world, our culture and at the same time an oral symbolization of a reality that wants to be universal, but which constantly changes according to the context of a phrase, place and time.

I naturally make analogical links on a daily basis between incongruous things with a rather quirky humor. Most of my works comecome from an idea related to my memories, words, the works of other more or less well-known artists and images of connected daily life (instagram, Pinterest) or not. This idea usually lives in me for a long time and turns in my head.

My work generally revolves around the question of the relationship. Whether pictorially or conceptually, I am very sensitive to the relationship between different elements. A bit like the elements of a sentence, it is enough to change a single letter sometimes so that the sentence has a completely different meaning. I also play with modifying the plans and perspectives of a work in order to recreate an unexpected reading.
 
I would say that what differentiates my works is a controlled cohabitation between simplicity and complexity. I create deconstructed spaces between synthetic reality and pictoriality. I try to make works that transport us to a world made of light, colors, values, composition, 2D volume and falsely realistic details that provoke emotions and a certain fascination. When I paint, I have fun transforming my ideological planes and pictorial planes. I often modify the original intention by letting myself be guided by my intuitions and the analogical links that can arise when I paint.

I would say that the purpose of my works often straddles Allegory and philosophical tales, with a demanding simplicity in the pictorial treatment as much as in the composition of the elements that form a kind of offbeat or even disjointed visual narrative. It is most of the time linked to a sort of hymn to the living, animal or vegetable, linked to superficiality.


In short, in my paintings I offer myself a space of freedom to assume my singularity in the hope of being able to share it with others. Because I am convinced that art knows something that words cannot say.