An entire side of current art brings history and dialogue back to the heart of aesthetic experience instead of turning away from it as many modern avant-garde partisans would do. In an exemplary way, painter Paul Beliveau, who acts in collusion with postmodern eloquence, takes part in this tendency to please the eye and “feed” the mind .
By examining the leanings of contemporary art in the last 20 years: neo-pop, statements, abstract hyperrealism, it appears that Beliveau’s work largely proceeds from the most current trends. Moreover, his paintings can be said to be a real digest of them!
The distinctive feature of this Quebec artist’s work expresses itself in the astonishing balance between the container and the contents, in the flavorsome ambiguity between truth and falsehood, in its gathering nature and in its capacity to break down the question of the discipline by giving back an eloquent and favored way of expression to pictorial medium. Why, indeed, would video, computer graphics or multimedia necessarily be more appropriate as a testimony to our epoch if painting, with an economy of means, succeeds in dealing with the same topics, ensuring the interest of a wider audience?
However, one should not consider Beliveau’s painting as a seducing gallery of pictures merely intended to charm or mystify the audience. The true essence of the artist’s work, his veritable virtuosity, does not reside in artifice and trompe-l’oeil art but in the consistency of a combinative process. A retrospective glance at his works is enough for one to figure out that they are related to meetings and concoctions. Since his oldest series like Les apparences or Les déplacements or, more recently, Cantus and Les vies parallèles, until today with Les humanités and Les rencontres, Paul Beliveau, like a real painting alchemist, has been playing at collecting and melting together, and the fact remains that syncretism, the principle of melting and blending, constitutes one of the outstanding features of today’s art
As the modern artist reckoned much with the creation of new forms, obsessed by the duty of performing a tabula rasa, the postmodern creator delights in using pre-existing forms and in combining them. Thus, references to former art movements are widespread in postmodern works, in varied aspects, from the re-appropriation of particular stylistic details to the application of traditional formal rules. In his capacity as an artist drawing from this postmodernity, Beliveau does not hesitate to nourish his output with past History (historicism) by blending old and new (eclecticism), to reduce the cleft between “major” and “minor” arts, to revive adornment and seduction (this latter which was held in such contempt by the avant-garde moderns) and to endow his paintings with an openly significant nature, often narrative, evolving therefore far beyond the formal, plastic and ideological concerns of his forerunners.
Adopting an approach which is both learned and eclectic, Beliveau attempts therefore to emphasize the existing contrasts and bring forth the paradox. His work legitimates the merging of genres and attests to a form of aesthetic syncretism, not through style or graphic achievement but thanks to the topic itself, this meaning painted pictures in which a thousand and one cultural and historical references, likely varied and sometimes incongruous, are intertwined. Consequently, this proclivity to gather and confront topics and themes without beating around the bush, both visually and conceptually, keeps upsetting the observer to whose deciphering labour an appeal is constantly made. Thus, this aesthetic “programme” is imprinted with the ambiguity and the paradox so cherished by postmodern artists. One will not be surprised then, that the artist has a liking for both abstract and figurative painting and does not hesitate to cross Piet Mondrian’s plastic architecture with the archetypal representational paintings of Andy Warhol.
On his canvas, Paul Beliveau binds time with space in order to spontaneously bring out culture, and avoids, following the example of the pop artists of the 60’s, any kind of hierarchical organization between a culture said to be “élitist” and a popular culture. Furthermore, his will to remain within the reach of the audience is illustrated by the connections he makes between these two cultures. This approach leads him to grant to the subjectivity of the observer a major place, while the modern artist would tend rather to turn his back on this observer, to confront him or even to reject him.
So, his painting is openly gathering. Whereas the figurative form on which his work is reliant straightaway appeals to the uninitiated, likewise its rich and sometimes learned content has the opportunity of seducing the scholar or, at least, the one who is eager to draw “mindfood“ from a piece. Consequently, his work fully takes part in this category of open works which characterizes, as Umberto Eco often mentioned it, the art of our time. At the same time, his art bears a subversive propensity which recalls the fundamental intentions of certain contemporary tendencies like neo-conceptual art, appropriationism or simulationism, whose aims are to elude and sometimes criticize the cultural and artistic norms.
In the end, under a guileless exterior, Beliveau’s work remains deeply lucid and daring. For this reason, it is not surprising that the painter delights in cultivating irony which may make the observer think. As a skilled tightrope walker, he moves forward over the thin border separating the false from the true and makes the most of the irony which is so appreciated by postmodern artists. Moreover, his pictorial work remains deeply self-referent, for it constitutes the screen of a biographical projection (his personal history is often introduced and depicted) as well as being a favorable medium to deal with art and especially painting.
Lastly, this ambiguity of style, in which illusionist figurative painting and an almost abstract formalism meet, reinforces the irony which is fed by illusion and sleight of hand. All in all, the “narrations” that spread out in Paul Beliveau’s works attest to a specifically humanist will of assertion in which the meeting becomes necessary. From here comes out a picture of humanity looking at itself, into and through time.
Dany Quine, 2008 Translated by Julien Lebargy
