Focus - Jean Gaudreau

As a contemporary artist from Quebec City, I am an experimental painter who revisits the pictorial traditions initiated by abstract expressionism. I begin my work from a conceptual starting point; then I proceed intuitively, entering into dialogue with the work. The artistic process largely determines the execution of the work, and one piece often leads to another. My existential questioning and research topics influence this starting point, as my creation is ultimately based on the meaning of life.

Moreover, my experience in the studio is a catalyst that allows me to transcend my concerns about the environment. Here, I use everyday objects that I paint and incorporate into my works. I explore abstraction and its symbolic vocabulary, which I transpose into a visual vocabulary derived from industrial tools and hardware as well as architectural elements of our heritage. The remains of the copper roofs of the Château Frontenac and the Price Building are thus reinterpreted in multiple pigmented pieces that are incorporated into my works, or even, become pretexts for the creation of new installations and organic sculptures whose very essence of raw materials such as aged wood and oxidized copper become the subject matter.

Far from painting an external world, it is my inner world with its own vocabulary that I put on canvas or any other medium that reveals itself to me. Deepening a very personal iconography, I introduce motifs and symbols into my creations that recur like signatures. The heart is the most revealing example of this. Like an imprint in time, I also inscribe a unique numbering code on my works that links them back to their coexistence.

My recent work, like my previous work, goes beyond the traditionally antinomic relationship between figuration and abstraction. Here and there, the barely sketched image wavers, staggers, flows, and melts, giving way to the painted initiative. It is a plastic universe built on the presence of the sign through traces sculpted into the material, traces that are in a way organic, a method that is not foreign to my previous explorations. The development of the whole, sometimes as a diptych, sometimes as a triptych or polyptych, is increasingly asserting itself as a recurring principle reminiscent of the industrial era.
Beyond their aesthetic character, my works seek to offer a space for meditation and the possibility of an encounter. Not only an encounter between material and gesture, but also and above all an encounter with the viewer. The viewer, both observer and actor, moves around, guided by themselves, through the paths offered to them. They can thus appropriate all the possibilities that unfold in a cascade from one work to another through the lively gestures, the surfaces smeared with ochre and brown, earth colors, bright blues, reds, and yellows, solar colors, celestial colors which, set in motion by the gesture, blossom on the canvases to be transformed into multiple perceptions of the gaze.