Collection: Yoakim Bélanger

Yoakim Bélanger was born in Montreal in 1977. Trained in graphic design at the Cégep du Vieux-Montréal and the Université du Québec à Montréal, Bélanger chose photography as his primary medium of expression. His professional experiences in graphic design, photography, and video unexpectedly led him to painting. Inspired by the world of multimedia, Yoakim Bélanger's pictorial approach has changed and intertwined. For him, there are no longer any boundaries between different mediums; they interact with each other. All his skills and acquired tools serve his approach. We are no longer in a dissociative universe, but rather an associative one. This is precisely what gives his painting its originality, whose most obvious singularity remains its steel plate supports, damaged by time and rust, already presenting the first textured traces of the work. The inspired artist begins a silent dialogue with the metal and deciphers its secrets.

His works explore more specifically the nude, the symbol, the body, the habitat of the soul or the body as an object? The patina of the reclaimed steel plates on which the bodies take shape brings us back to the mystery of our becoming: who are we? Are we? Yoakim Bélanger seeks to create a new order of balance of the subject in the space of his support. He likes to work by contrast and this is perhaps what gives his paintings this impression of a stage space where the elements confront each other in their own paradoxes, those of shadow and light, abstraction and figuration, spirit and matter. "I use the human body as a prism of emotions, colors and light that is not afraid of contradictions." Yoakim Bélanger experiments, sees and creates vibrant tributes to life.