Artist Statement of Bourdeau Artiste Peintre

“A work can always be improved upon. It also changes according to each and everyone’s imagination. My dearest wish is to reach that masterpiece that anchors my entire undertaking.”

Bourdeau Artiste Peintre (real name: Raynald Bourdeau) is a painter filled with generosity, forever thinking and taking an interest in his natural surroundings. He is engaged in two distinct but complementary approaches: figurative and abstract art.

After much thinking and experimenting with painting, Bourdeau has accepted his dual esthetic approach which allows him to explore the two energies that spark life. Bourdeau needs to paint what he sees under the open skies just as much as he needs to explore matter —in all of its rawness and hidden mysticism— through its physical properties and its behavior in the designated space. His desire to showcase his surroundings leads him to travel between what he carries within him and what lies outside. This flow between inside and outside initiated his dual approach.

His figurative interpretation of landscapes is not meant to be cartoonish but rather to come as close as possible to reality as he perceives it. Figuration puts Bourdeau in touch with nature’s changing colors, atmospheres, and lighting. In his abstract art, it is spontaneity that generates the planes, colors, and lines, which can be either precise or flowing. In Bourdeau’s approach to abstract painting, it is first the elements —the water, the pigments, and the canvas— that come to the fore and express themselves. Very mechanical, this first gesture allows him to access his unconscious. The following strokes bring his unconscious closer to his consciousness, towards a metaphysical space in which he aims to balance the elements: colors, planes, lines, and directions.

Through his figurative pieces, Bourdeau communicates his love and gratitude for nature. His abstract paintings convey a more philosophical meaning: They invite the viewer into his universe, his perception of balance and space. The spectator approaches the painting, explores it with his or her own environment as a reference point, and then creates his or her own interpretation of the work. That is how it comes to life: the spectator recreates the work by inverting the polarities.

Bourdeau has been influenced both by great Canadian and international landscape artists and by contemporary artists such as the Automatists, the Surrealists, the Cubists, and those associated with Lyrical Abstraction. Rich colors and textures uphold his paintings’ geometric and lyrical universe. The rhythms they suggest, fragments from some paintings or the triangulation of others are all dynamic factors that foster emotion. Perpetually searching for balance between the real world and fantasy, Bourdeau welcomes all possibilities and respects both matter and spirit as substances from which life is generated.