SYNTHESIS

A series of paintings by Franco-Quebec painter François Haguier that offers a precarious balance between abstraction and figurative art. It attempts to simplify the representations of the landscape and allow the spectators to add their inventiveness and their sensitivity to the work. This landscape abstraction initially invented and created through various studies and computer montages, is finally expressed on wooden panels in panoramic or square formats. He favors acrylic painting and multi-layered ink colorization to create a vaporous and blurred effect (sfumato).

BIOGRAPHY

Originally from Rouen, France, artist François Haguier has lived in Sherbrooke, Quebec for almost 30 years. A self-employed graphic designer under the name Artsversus Multimedia, the world of creation and visual communications inhabits his daily life. Musician, cinephile and passionate about the visual arts, he has been enthusiastically navigating the world of painting since he was very young.

Encouraged by many stimulating and inspiring artistic encounters, it was in 2010 that he began his first experiments on canvas with acrylic, but without abandoning his digital creations printed on plexiglass. He creates abstract paintings on canvas in small formats. The interest of his peers is very much present.

At the beginning of 2013, everything accelerated. With new pictorial experiments and a mix of new styles, the dimensions of his canvases increase, leaving all the space necessary for his gestures to take flight freely. He participates in various artistic events in the Eastern Townships. In the fall of 2013, he had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Courtemanche in Magog, which still represents him today. In 2015, the Y.L. Bombardier Cultural Centre in Valcourt opened its doors for a major exhibition, a synthesis of three years of research and experimentation. Entitled Ondes de choc, the latter has lyrical and landscape abstraction as its common thread.

From 2016 to 2019, he was represented by Galeries Beauchamps throughout the province and in Toronto with Luxart Gallery in Montreal and Gallery 806 in Mont-Tremblant, with whom he sells his paintings in the United States and Europe. In 2019, he opened his art gallery in Sherbrooke. In addition to the cultural events he organizes, he participates in an average of 3 or 4 solo or group exhibitions annually, such as the Grande Virée artistique de Sherbrooke (2021-2022-2023). After the closure of his Gallery at the end of 2021, it is a return to the source of creation and challenges with new learnings such as the art of watercolor.

ARTISTIC APPROACH

Combining digital technology and classical techniques to take us through his universe, he develops his iconography incorporating different influences ranging from J.M. William Turner to Caspar D. Friedrich, or George Mathieu and even Dali through his paranoia-critical approach to creation.

From his first paintings, even unconsciously, the landscape is always at the center of his subject - at first urban and flamboyant with his Skyline collection, then gradually at the heart of a misty nature, almost ghostly in its landscape abstractions or completely imaginary and abstract in its lyrical abstractions. 3 styles with a particular signature that complement each other and sometimes merge into the same mysterious composition.

Always on the move, his art oscillates between realism and abstraction. In an almost abstract interpretation, these blurred, bare landscapes take us on a tour of unconscious territories, with multiple horizons where mountains and misty forests are hidden. His landscapes were initially conceptualized and created by computer. Montages of photos and pieces of paintings of all kinds are mixed on the screen until they are satisfied and then reproduced as best, they can in acrylic and ink on wooden panels. Brushes of all kinds, recycled rags, spatulas, rigid rollers, sandpaper, fingers, everything is considered.

The realization stage becomes a back-and-forth between a concrete acrylic version and the fantasized digital model. The paintings under construction are photographed at each milestone to confront them with the dream objective and validate the accuracy of the next intervention on the canvas. Thanks to computers, archived steps often become a visual option for the basis of a future design.

The fragile balance between abstraction and realism is at the heart of his approach and is expressed with multiple variations in his digital studies and paintings. To what extent does a simple line become a mountain or a building in the viewer's mind? Finding the purest sign is a perpetual challenge, knowing that the observer's state of mind and cultural ringing will be the key to a certain understanding of the web.