Patrick Pepin

Patrick Pepin is an auto-didactic painter who works from an abstraction of action. Using his unique style and brilliant color palette, he has left his mark on the art scene. Pepin’s varied experiences in global and artistic journey are unique to his life beliefs. For many years, Pepin’s travels have influenced and challenged him in every aspect of his life. Inspired by his travels, Pepin’s art reflects freedom, movement, and decisions that he makes spontaneously on the road and in the process of creation. Pepin’s paintings, he says, represents a sincere and frank confession. They are in a state of realized detachment and enforced by spontaneous gestures in calculated disorder. They often express repressed images belonging to the realm of dreams and the unconscious. They are created in several steps, by successive layers. For Pepin there exists a link between travel and his artistic process. Here lays the journey that matters to him, the decisions he makes during realization of the paintings and which appear to be irreversible choices. Thus in his works all is not determined in advance. Pepin likes to think outside the box to explore new avenues, likewise travelling in unknown lands is born of chance encounters. Pepin plays a game of chance in life and art to create contrasts and harmony between colors, people and space.Patrick Pépin is a Canadian visual artist, born in 1976 in Lac-Mégantic, a town in Quebec located in Estrie. In the art world, he owes his international success to his abstract works which combine unique mixtures of colors and to his singular and inventive way of representing the world which is constantly evolving. The artist has painted, drawn and sculpted since childhood. It was by becoming aware of the fragility of life that he made his first encounter with art. “When I was very little, my mother had cancer, a doctor came to see me and said: “Your mother is very ill, she may die, you are going to have to be very strong, is- Do you understand what that means? » When I got home, I went into the garden, took a pebble and carved a drawing on a rock. In my childhood mind, it was the only way to escape death, you had to leave a mark somewhere. » This conscious sensitivity is felt everywhere in Pépin's work. By browsing his collections, we understand that he is the interpreter of a global vision of the world which goes well beyond what is perceptible to the naked eye. A tireless traveler – he has visited more than thirty countries – he finds much of his raw material in this journey around the world. But if the journey is the starting point of his exploration, his creative process is not premeditated and often begins in the unconscious. Pépin's art expresses freedom and movement. Aside from commonplaces, the artist finds his inspiration in everything and everywhere. Working on contrasts in a sort of controlled chaos, he manages to distance himself sufficiently from his subject to give it its own consistency. The result is all the more impressive as most of his works are painted on canvases of disproportionate proportions which increase the effect tenfold. In recent years, the artist has begun to incorporate posters of his own paintings taken in photos into his works. These are cut out, glued back together in a different order, painted and reworked with Indian ink before being photographed again, cut out and glued back into other works. A true canvas within a canvas, this approach inspired by Street art echoes the selfie frenzy and the navel-gazing which contaminates current societies. From the end of November 2019 and until June 2020, a gigantic mural by the artist inspired by the Playing Cards series was exhibited at the Musée d'art contemporain de Baie-Saint-Paul (MACBSP). The artist is also working with a company on a mural project planned for 2021. The immense work measuring 3 meters by 2 meters will be made up of recycled objects of all kinds. Project details will be announced later.