Born in Hull (Gatineau) in 1955, Michel Martineau lives and works in Montréal. A professional visual artist since 1976, he has taken part in numerous solo and group exhibitions in Québec, Canada and internationally.

From the 1980s onward, in the wake of Postmodernism, he developed a singular position: in a world already saturated with images, painting becomes not only a site of resistance, but also one of analysis and the reconstruction of vision.

His work is rooted in the confrontation between image, form and painterly materiality. Combining fragmentation, sequencing and the force of gesture, his early works create tension between the reproduction of images and the uniqueness of the painting, proposing a reflection on originality, multiplicity and the temporality of the work of art.

Since the 2000s, his artistic practice has deepened through the reuse of his own painting and a renewed engagement with its history and creative process. Earlier and recent productions — reproduced and recomposed — are fused through material and physical gesture. His painting becomes a metaphor for cultural and social history.

Each painting acts as a field of forces: accumulated gestures, chromatic tensions, geometric architectures and fleeting figurations coexist in an unstable balance. The playful and the tragic collide in a discourse linked to affect, subjectivity, and multiple structures of space and time.

These monumental compositions, with their vivid colours and raw treatments, reflect our present human condition and echo our different perceptions of the world.