Artist
Marc Poissant is a self-taught artist who was born in Montreal in 1945. While studying « Humanities » at Concordia University from 1965 to 1970, he began to rediscover the art of painting, an activity which had occupied some of his leasure time as a child but had been ignored during the years of his adolescence and early adult life.
Although his initial approach to painting was essentially traditional, he soon realized the limitations imposed on him by the drudgery of copying nature and turned instead toward modern trends. Borrowing much from modernism, but without falling prey to what he considers a veritable « obsession with newness » in modern art, he discovered that he was primarily a formalist painter. That is, although he recognized the validity of using art to comment on life situations or even simply to register pleasant sceneries or objects, painting was above all a matter of the free interplay of its basic elements, where the limitless reshuffling of forms, colors, lights and shades and even textures constitute the very heart of this kind of creation. In his particular case, each painting had to generate new relationships, especially between colors, which he correctly regards as its most subtle element.
Although he feels perfectly free to paint in a non-figurative manner, most of his work has so far revolved around landscape. However, the landscapes are always the product of his imagination. Here, not only visual memories but the entire inner life of the artist comes into play to produce a painting that is never planned ahead of time. In this particular way of working, every gesture on the canvas determines the next one and accidents are as much a part of the painting’s genesis as anything willed or contrived. A good painting seems to result from many determinants, but the key to the matter is the artist’s very « presence » to his work, his ability to reach to those inner sensibilities, which alone, if allowed to surface, will yield anything worthwhile.
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