ADÈLE BLAIS
Adèle Blais painting is her quest, a venue for personal growth She uses it to express her daily life, her relationships. “When I paint, the canvas becomes the backdrop of my play. Like a sponge, I’ve absorbed the actors’ stories, the events in my life and I render them in my way.” Her unique style, described by one New York critic as “neo-pop-happy”, mixes superimposed washes of vibrant acrylic colors with textured collages, small pieces of text and black contour lines, giving her paintings their distinctive signature. The result is reminiscent of an assembled puzzle where the black lines are the vestiges of a separation that is still possible. Where her subjects are not bared of clothing and skin, they are dressed in flamboyant and theatrical clothing.
“The characters in my paintings are reconstructions, an assembly of impressions, the evocations of emotions, of memories; they are the materialization of the inspirations coming from unknown places. My creative process is to put in juxtaposition the interior and the exterior, 2D and 3D. It’s to be present and work from a neutral space between opposite poles from which everything emerges. It’s a dichromatic representation of the hidden and the outwardly expressed emotion; it’s marrying the world of appearances that is expressed in costumes, frills, and colors, and a dimension that I can’t name but that I feel. I want to bare the souls of my subjects, go to the quick, attempt to interpret what, according to me, is going on deeper than the clothing, deeper than the skin. In fact, I’m trying to show what’s in their gut!”
This is the artistic signature of the artist who more often than not, she says, vacillate between everything and its opposite, between her secret gardens and the appeal of the public place.
Adèle Blais was born in Montréal, Canada in 1976, daughter to a non-conventional single mother. When she was one, they moved to Sherbrooke, QC, Canada where she spent her childhood and teenage years. She grew up in an eccentric environment where creativity in all its forms was celebrated and encouraged. Very young, she learned that it was OK to be different and to express herself inventively.
After studying in publicity at the Université de Montréal, she worked in the field for nearly two years, and despite the success that she had in it, she had to admit that it wasn’t her kind of world. During this period, she continued to paint regularly until finally, in 2006, she took her paintings out of the closet and showed them at the Festival International Montréal en Arts (FIMA). At the end of the first day, she had sold most of her paintings. By the end of the four-day festival, her paintings had all been sold. Quite the revelation for the young self-taught artist!
Ever since that time, Adèle has successfully dedicated herself to her art. She has sold paintings to collectors and other fans of her art not only in Québec and Canada, but also in Brazil, in the U.S.A. and in Europe. She has had shows in Miami, New York, Montréal and Toronto as well as in her home town of Sherbrooke. In the course of her career, she has produced several pieces for private collectors and murals for businesses in the city of Montréal. Some of her paintings were used on the sets of T.V. shows, a Hollywood film and an international publicity for Dell. In 2012, her work was the object of a very positive critique on Critiquart, a European website dedicated to emerging artists.