ROGER KATCH - Download PDF here
Montrealer artist and designer, ROGER KATCH counts more than 30 years of national and international accomplishments in CONCEPTUAL DESIGN, CORPORATE IMAGE and ARTISTIC CREATIONS.
After graduating from the DESIGN & TECNOLOGY Institute in Italy, KATCH arrived in Montreal during the magic of EXPO.67 with the intention of visiting Canada. He immediately fell in love with the country, decided to make Quebec his home, pursued studies in ERGONOMICS at the Université de Montréal and launched his own DESIGN & ART studio. KATCHs professional career, quickly took flight, thanks to several major and exclusive projects in Canada, the United States and Europe.
If most of us take for granted the many symbols that depict certain aspects of our urban landscape, the same cannot be said of Roger KATCH. His artworks embrace a unique, powerful, innovative graphical expression and his conceptual approach strongly favours a minimalist purity of style. These particularities make him a much sought-after and celebrated artist in MODERN ARCHITECTURE projects, as well as the Avant-Garde cultural milieu and among the new generation of young professionals.
KATCH participated in various research workshops, cultural events, seminars, exhibitions
and experienced enormous success within his artistic works. Heralded by the art-critics as POPART ARTIST very nouveau-genre, KATCHs works are more than simple compositions executed to excel the highest level in GRAPHIC DESIGN. Keenly identifiable as optical aphorisms, each piece exposes confrontational values, by transforming common objects, into intelligible messages rich in sarcasm and iconoclastic tones. By creating a visual synthesis charged with subtle humour, KATCHs inquisitive eye, transforms pictographic elements with plenty of daring and harmony, into pure ART.
Since the colours selections are applied from the palette offered by the manufacturer, the perfect HARD-EDGE*execution of KATCHs acrylics on canvas, emulates silk-screen printing. Plexiglas, glass and mirror panels are other media often used to support collages of three-dimensional objects in conjunction with neon tubing as an interactive element. Executed in variable styles, KATCHs trademark hearts are present in many of his compositions with roles that seem to reflect the struggle of humanity, in placing materialism against idealized love. Finally, the graphic element in KATCHs work is often complemented by written idiomatic expressions that bring voice to the visual aspect of the composition creating a direct and witty dialog with the viewer who can read between the lines.
Cynical yet hopeful, KATCH sagacious symbolism, stands as an ongoing commentary facing our society and forces us to reflect about the false values confronting the human spirit.
Hard-Edge Techniques*
At the end of the fifties, art-critics came up with this term, to satisfy a need to describe the non-gestural input abstract style painting. After having gone through some terminological adjustments... HARD-EDGE now refers to a preconceived pictorial technique, dividing the paintings surface in coloured planes with sharply defined geometrical contours, having no colour transition between one and the other.
An initiator in that field is the American Artist Ellsworth Kelly, who creates in 1949/50 an artistic abstraction, based on a serial repetition of graphic elements painted in full, clear, solid tones, uniformly delimited and distributed on the canvas. From then on, HARD-EDGE came into being and was very rapidly adopted by the greatest modern-art painters such as: Lichtenstein, Tousignant, Molinari and
last but not least, Roger Katch.
The use of HARD-EDGE as a technique during the sixties and seventies, can also be seen in most of the contemporary works executed in POPART style, with a tremendous influence on graphics, where purity and precision in die-cutting of geometrical shapes are mandatory. Bringing together this technique to that style, favours large format creative expression artworks, which interestingly enough, are also found in Modern, High-Tech and Neo-Classical Architecture.
