Since my childhood, painting challenged me when I saw my father painting. His ability to reproduce realistic scenes fascinated me. In elementary school, I had a lot of fun and I spent a lot of time doing visual arts.
During teenage, considering that I could not paint at home, a person lent me a room: a piece just for me and my art! It was a turning point for me. Some people, whom I did not know, came to see what I was painting. I was a painter.
Subsequently, for many years, I drew a lot in my spare time. I made sketches freehand where we could see faces, landscapes and various unreal forms. I tirelessly drew curves, as spontaneously as possible, in order to create the purest forms. I also did a few lead pencil portraits, but I always came back to the spontaneous movements made with ballpoint pen on sheets of paper.
I consider myself self-taught. I like to say that drawing and painting are old habits for me!
It was in the late 80s that my professional career began. I had the chance to frequent during a few years the painter Marcelin Dufour. I showed him my paintings and through his constructive comments, he accompanied me, without directing me in my artistic approach.
I think that painting is first and foremost a creative act. To paint is to defy the irrational in order to give birth to something new.
During these years, I mixed and spread with my hands the painting directly on the canvas. I still made curves using spontaneous gestures, but this time with color (oil painting on canvas). Everything was abstract. I was looking for purity, which I found in abstraction and in spontaneous gestures.
I also made paintings with my fingers, following the rhythms that I imagined.
In the 90s, my technique gradually evolved. I made several oil abstract paintings, in which there was no trace of the hand. My goal was to allow the colors, by diluting them a lot, to intermingle so that they themselves bring us into the unexpected.
At the end of the 90s, while maintaining this abstract technique, I added over clean lines, similar to those of my adolescence: textured lines that served as an outline for my subjects (characters or stylized animals or other abstract forms). All my paintings were preceded by sketches made freehand with a pen, as in my teenage. Moreover in these years, I was inspired by some of my sketches of adolescence. This journey allowed me to make a loop with my great passions of teenage: clean lines, both impulsive and suggestive, with abstract colored backgrounds.
Over the years, this technique has evolved. In my paintings, I created a white background dotted with colored spots or a powder blue background. On these funds, I added "contour lines", which I filled with color.
2018: I make a return to the abstract world. I developed a new technique. This allows me to create works that are an extension of myself.
At the beginning of each creation, I think about how to place the first streams of colors on the canvas, but very quickly the rational gives way to spontaneous gestures.
Throughout the creation, I improvise. I instinctively adjust myself to the colors and shapes that appear on the canvas. Each step of creation becomes a source of inspiration.
It is the creative process that guides me and allows me to create original environments.
In addition, I often question myself. I am looking for my origins. Where am I going? What am I made of? When creating my abstract paintings, my gestures project an interior that is not really palpable,an interior that is constantly changing and moving, in the universe.
However, the process of creation and the finished work gives me the impression of always being a little closer to my first essence.
Michel Poirier
artistic approach