Artist Statement
by painter Luc Fortier

Since I started painting, I have been fascinated by the human race. The body and face can give rise to thousands of variations, and the slightest change in expression brings about a completely different emotion.

What I try to capture in a portrait or in a figurative painting is the essence of the soul, a thought, a feeling, a moment of intimacy. This emotion comes through a choice of colors, textures, but above all through the eyes.

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My work is usually done on large canvasses and take the form of brightly colored assemblage that is characterized by the use of rectangular shaped dabs of paint that are juxtaposed, superimposed and oriented in an essentially random way which gives them a contemporary pointillist style. The result, although coarser, brings a much greater richness of color intensity, particularly when complementary colors are used.

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The materiality of the painting develops thanks to the work with the knife which leaves the testimony of the passage and the fight of the tool with the matter. I generally use acrylic paint as a medium to which I sometimes combine aggregates such as sand, glass or fibers to obtain a texture that supports the subject.

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The image is built slowly and iteratively. It takes shape at a distance. In this process, evocation and emotion are more important to me than exact reproduction.

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Perhaps this obsession with representing the human body which is a set of curves by a set of rectangles comes from my engineering background where I used finite element modeling to analyze complex structures.