A diptych made during the first peak of the Covid-19 pendemia, while both of my daughters were claiming, spaces and lots of attention. To me that work still looked unfinished, but showed it anyway in my last solo show, called CONFINITUDES, that took place in a Montreal temporary gallery, from october 2022 'till february 2023.

Vacarme innachevé

The neighborhood where I was born is completely changed today. Split into two parts very distinct from each other. On the one hand, we can see the harmful effects of rapid gentrification... Housing not at all affordable, property even less accessible... Leaving all the room for crooked owners who only see the realization of profit by selling this to ever more foreign interests, who care nothing about the whole community aspect. The other side of the neighborhood, the one where I was born, is even more dilapidated than it was... Left to its sad fate. an almost abandoned neighborhood whose existence no one remembers anymore and the people who remained there are still 100 times more plunged into a state of extreme precariousness... All this against the backdrop of a provincial government which completely denies a housing crisis exacerbated throughout its territory. Same government which denies ambient systemic racism and which struggles to recognize the greater precariousness of the status of women. Same government that doesn't care about the workers of its entire health network and its education network. But everything is fine in Quebec.

Un quartier en abandon

The french title stand as : Learning the language of the sun 

The subtitle stand as : Living with the climate changes crisis

I guess it says it all!!!

Apprendre la langue du soleil (Vivre avec les changements climatiques)

Realized a few weeks after beeing hospitalized fro my right lung, still not knowing to this day what happened and still waiting for a diagnozed situation. 

Au cœur des Incertitudes (A lung left with no answers)

A large canvas that could easily be fit into the Inner Conversation series. 

Upside down ou les refus dans le déni

Another piec of paper artwork in the same vein as the Momentanément entre parenthèses, another title you can also find here on my portfolio.

Recharge & Revolt

Another early morning on an hospital table to get a second bronchoscopy and biopsy. An already framed canvas with layers and layers of acrylic.

Intrusion matinale

Living some frustrated moments right now since last march. Still not knowing what's up with my right lung. Dr says it might not be a cancer but an infection that we don't know nothing about it or the origins yet! 

Momentanément entre parenthèses

Very first piece made in 2024... The bright colors that serve as joyful Christmas festivities are overshadowed by the forgetfulness experienced by Palestinians around the world. Worse! The international community already seems to have descended into denial of your existence.

Dissonance & Apartheid

A triptych made not long after seeing a new documentary on one of the most popular canadian artist, Jean-Paul Riopelle. The work started out as a collage... So if you look meticulously at the whole work, you'll find some collage of a text written by Bob Mould. From, the era as a frontman for the eclectic noise rock band Hüsker Dü. The text was titled Divide and Conquer... So right there I had my title. 

Divide et Impera

Being lonseome, talking to myself in the beautiful capitol city of Icelanf. This piece was sketxhed up in Reykjavik, but painted on Canvas here in Montreal after a long nice trip in Iceland.

Under the midnight sun ( An inner-schizo conversation in Reykjavik)

This is the first piece of a series started in Reykjavik (Iceland) and finished in my home town of Montreal (Canada). The series was all about Inner conversations I had with myself while I was lonesome on a trip to Iceland... So lonesome at the ned of the trip that I almost probably looked schizophrenic to so many people, just watching me taslk to myself sometimes out loud as I was alone forgetting that many poeple surrounded me. So I started to sketch up in Iceland on paper to finish the series on canvas here in Montreal. I almost lost all these sketched up papers, because of a flood I had in my studio in february 2022.

The Inner Conversation - NO.1

Another part of the depressed state we're all stucked in during the very first big confinement of the Covid pendemic era. 

Saouler l'ennuie aux abords des vides - NO.1

While working with lines and geometric forms, the title poped to me as they're so many places and doors that are restricted to the passages of human beings... Sometimes theses restrictions comes within our own selves, by the education we had from weither our parents or teachers or other members of family.

L'emprise des restrictions (Restricted Area)

Each every morning we wake up and go to ''war'' ... Everyday life, becomes a fragmented turbulent state for most of the people on this planet and the daily life ''war'' is about making time and having time. 

Fragments pour une reprise des hostilités

Almost everyone around me caught that shitty virus of covid-19 during the first biggest streak of the virus... Me nothing... Still nothing during the second biggest and third waves... In 2022, while all these people we're starting to see each other and meet, I finally caught it! My girlfriend and both my daughters still upstairs, while I had to sleep over in my studio during 3 weeks, sick as a dog... At least, I did this piece!

Out of sight

Part of a series in tribute of a women painter exhibit in Montreal, 2022\. I did a few pieces to pay tribute to the painter Lee Krasner and not Miss Pollock, but Lee Krasner the painter that I truly find inspiring... So I submited my few pieces tributing Miss Krasner without reading right the guidelines... I guess I was truly excited to do these few pieces. But in the guidelines it said that since it was a show tributing women painter, the pieces should be made by women to enter the show. So I wasn't part of the show.

Demain les flammes

The final experimentation... The longest one... at 2h30 in the very first moment of the morning... Ears and eyes still widely opened up to some more sounds and noises!

Ce qui nous traverse no.5

Still on an inspirational streak from ear to eye with the loud sounds from experimental instrumental post-rock shoegaze band CE QUI NOUS TRAVERSE.

Ce qui nous traverse no.4

One same day of creation, improvising some images while the instrumental musicality of the post-rock experimental duo CE QUI NOUS TRAVERSE shared the ambients room of mine.

Thanks guys!

Ce qui nous traverse no.2

One piece made during a creative day while the experimental instrumental post-rock duo CE QUI NOUS TRAVERSE played and improvised on what I was doing and ''vice-versa''. What a great day and night of creation!

Ce qui nous traverse no.1

Part of a solo show I put up in 2013, at the Crystal Racine Gallery in Montreal, this was a collage paying kind of an ode or a tribute to one of my faverite artist, Gil Joseph Wolman. The dada saying here was just to brought up the kind of phrasing Wolman used many times just to make a few head turned back and think!

L'œil fumigène (Hommage à Gil Joseph Wolman)

I guess this piece was made just for the fun of getting back into a moment of pure creation. Experimenting to work with cement, which it is not a matter that I used very often.

La dérive en déroute

During the Covid-19 pendemia, it seems and looks like there was an inverted spell on human beeing. On a day by day basis, lots of human beeing tends to keep on watching life until they almost even reach some part of emptiness... Since March 2020, it looks like emptiness has kept looking on us.

Aux aguets des vides

Since I can't paint into my workshop, for at least 3 months, because of a water flood... I started to do some collages on my kitchen table, while both of daughters are sleeping, as well as my girlfriend. Here's a first one for a maybe series... Not sure, don't know!

Figures de la négation

23 degrees below ZERO... Even with the heater rolling in the workshop, it was cold. As much cold that you won't only wear a t-shirt. Looking outside the window, the Icy gray landscape in front of you attracted your attention into some melancholia thoughts of the next spring.

Hazy shades of winter

Influenced by a very long walk through the city of Montreal... Keep walking without any goals or directions... Discovering your very hometown and taking another look... The look you never took... The one you won't never take on a daily basis, because you're too much caught up into the immediate task of a A to B running. Drift anywhere... Drift just to get out of your day by day living, once in a while.

Unknown roads

Everything in life seems to turn around what you do for a living and it is also how we definite our selves today... Only by the working habits of everyone. It is kind of heavy on the shoulder of each in everyone of us, but it keeps rolling on and on. What you do for a living is defnitely what you are and nothing else... Not what you think, not what you like and certainly not what you dislike or don't think. It's like a machine has program us to become very slowly like another machine.

La maudite machine

A large wood pannel embellished by pieces of canvas, foamboard, wood, paper collage, oil sticks, acrylic, cardboard, pieces of wall paper, coton strings... Briefly, an assemblage bringing me back to the apathy of my 80's and 90's.. 

Gazing into the void since our careless youthful years

Initialy that piece was a collage of paper with a poem from Jacques Prévert... So if you meticulously look at it you'll find and see lots of little paper collage on the canvas. 

Le visage dans le sécateur du temps

A simple sight, maybe abstract or not, a moment of observation right on the street while coming to work in '' MON ATELIER'' ... Concrete, brick, asphalt, architecture and urban infrastructure has always fascinated me. Even if I often criticised urbanism of our times and what has become these practice of urbanism and architecture these days... It still is pretty much intriguing for me and very fascinating. 

Urbanité

Joyfull painting at 5 AM while the night ends and the sun start to germs his shinny haze of the day. Being alone for this '' crépuscule spectacle '' while creating without a theme, just starting another white canvas with the flow and the fun of nothingness clearing your head!

Les matinées esseulées

Sometimes silence can be very cold and even painful, but if you listen very well and carefully to silence and let go the flow, you'll see and find some little warm and deep thoughts about life. 

Ce froid silence

That third part of a serie called PERSONNE À RAISON that turn around the subject of homelessness, with an angry image poetry abstract look.

Les pieds sur une chaise, le cœur à l'envers 

Being in confinement, trying to find a space in the house to create, but kids are taking so much space and so much time... Anyway I love you both, but sometimes I need my time and my space also. Love you so much, my daughters.

Y a toujours un éléphant dans la pièce

Déforestation

An abstract piece part of a serie called PERSONNE À RAISON talking about homelessness... The serie was sold and all the benefits went to a Montreal community organization doing great thiungs for homeless people.

Plus personne ne trouvent sa maison

An abstract triptych wishing that the world could burn down without pain and turmoil, so we could just built another new and more beautifully equal world!

Et les sutures demeurent toujours ouvertes (TRIPTYCH)

Wish you could evade all your problems... But it just keep coming back, no matter where you are and where you want to go. There' s no way out, nowhere to hide! This abstract canvas depicts that feeling when you want to be somewhere ekse and where you wish you could live in total denial.

The great somewhere else (Covering up the lies)

An abstract work made with oil sticks on linen, already framed... It is like a ''RAPPEL'' of this digging the days in 2018, another piece you can see in my gallery here. 

Still digging the days (But sowing seeds)

Scratching off the surface as if you are digging your day off! Abstract work made on a medium sized canvas, in 2018.

Digging the days until our eyes falls down

An abstraction made around the subject of the environmental crisis. 

Everything falls apart again

An abstract work inspired by the works of Norman Lewis as well as by the imagery of Franz Kline, this piece depict our world in crisis. The french title might stand as The Collapse Continuity. 

Continuité de l'effondrement

This abstract piece is part of a 3 works serie made on the subject of homelessness after a few homeless people organized themselves kind of a fortune camp underneath one of the biggest bridge in Montreal, Canada and got litteraly kicked out and smashed up by cops and the Montreal authorities. The 3 pieces got sold in 2019 and all the benfits of the sale we're given to a community organization doing great work with homeless people.

Des feuilles mortes qui descendent la rivière

A large and slowly made abstract work. If you look meticulously and upclose at first and back up while still looking, I just hope you'll see that the fragiles monuments I'm talking about in this visual poetry, is life in itself in a state of anguished waiting of something to happen. Briefly, it's a day by day living slowly and lonely watching as life goes so fast, but sometimes nothing seems to happen that it looks to slow where emptyness looks like the only thing that nhas passed thru the day.

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Benoît Tremblay