ANTOINE CLAES - Click here for PDF

The city is often unloved by both art enthusiasts and even numerous artists. Nevertheless, those who were inspired by the city often knew how to turn it into masterful works. Some were also interested in the urbanity and the others will be, in the future, probably even more than before. A more familiar subject to the contemporary art, the fact remains that the city, with its machines, its factories and all its industrial buildings can also express a grayness rich in the pictorial point of view. Sure thing, this subject handled without the "trivial" contributes updates the pictorial expression. Like the case of Antoine Claes, an artist who until recently was unknown. And for whom a stroll on the freeway 40 in the sector of refineries in the northeast of Montreal or a walk in Charleroi, situated in the southeast of its native country, Belgium, offers him a real rich poetic inspirational show. He is not wrong.

Born at the beginning of 1970s, Antoine Claes has studied design, which lends his work a remarkable spark. Also our visual landscape changed well during the last thirty years. He was born along with the computer game and the computing, in a time when everything changed. As the impressionists in France who, as young adults, lived the ecstasy of the industrial revolution when it arrived earlier in England at the time of Turner. (Curious all the same!). So it's normal that the current painting, conceived by artists now in their thirties, ventures somewhere else and in a new way. Is it the end for the rural subjects' fictionalized treatment? They do have the hard life...

Prevent, everything is in everything, the paint is going to follow the other contemporary forms of expression, as the music, the video and the computing. For his part, Antoine Claes was enticed by the urban "trash," by walking in the industrial district of Toronto. It is there that he had his architectural shock. For him, it is the revelation, an inexhaustible source for inspiration. Compositions, structures, materials, lights: everything jumped him full in the face. The shock was felt his whole being. Since then, the architecture, particularly of the industrial city, occupies an essential place in his work and its aestheticism.  

It is not about a social criticism, nor about an inquisitive glance on the postindustrial society. The painter above all wants to show that the beauty, or what we name it, is an evolutionary notion, like in a certain period when the industry was rising, we painted rural and bucolic subjects. It is because it was about the past and not about present and even less, the future. Along with that the past always carries a certain dose of nostalgia... Today, the industry has no more than future, its days are numbered, and normally the nostalgia joins it as the rust on metal. Rust, which we see now as a patina and not as tarnish.

Antoine Claes's paintings are soaked in a diffuse light in and a dramatic light mist, like the bathed landscapes of Turner and those of Monet at the time of their fabulous painting inspired by the modernity of their time. It's a big success for this young artist: managing to transform our glance before the whole society changes it. It's premonitory work.


EDUCATION

2000         
  Training course in graphic design, Studio of the Mountain, Montreal

1995-1999     
  Diploma of first cycle, Design Art, Concordia University, Montreal

1994-1995     
  Academic year, Industrial Design, Higher École of Visual Arts of Cambers, Brussels, Belgium

1993-1994     
  Training course in stringed-instrument trade (organ), Brussels, Belgium

1990-1993     
  DEC in Visual Arts, College of St. Lawrence, Quebec

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

12-2008
  Make-a-Wish foundation, Galerie MX, Montréal
  Art,Encens & Myrrhe, Galerie MX, Montréal
  - Intersection, Bar O Patro Vys, Montréal

INDIVIDUAL EXHIBITIONS

2003
  Abstractedly, Artus Gallery, Montreal

2002
  Banal phenomenon, Zeke Gallery, Montreal

1997
 series of fabrics pointillists on the topic of horizontality, Spaces commercial, Montreal

1991
  public Presentation, Association of the artists of Lasalle, Quebec (certificate of honor)

ARTICLES

2009
 Antoine claes: nostalgie postindustrielle, Parcours, Robert Bernier, Vol.14 no 2, Printemps-été 2009, p.73