Benoît Tremblay
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SOLO SHOW
→ October 2022 - February 2023 Confinitudes! / Ephéméride Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ April 2016 Digging the days until tearing off our eyes / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ May 2014 In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni #2 / Crystal Racine Gallery Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ March-April 2011 In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni #1 / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montréal, Qc, Canada
→ September 2010 PAROLES!-WORDS! / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ April 2009 Ailments & Screams / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ April 2008 Life is a political tear-off / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ April - June 2006 A New Situation / Vice-Versa Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
COLLECTIVE SHOWS
→ Nov 2023-Jan 2024 Art of the words / SASSE Museum / Pomona, CA, USA
→ Oct 2023-Nov 2023 Annual Living Mark / Verum Ultimum Gallery / Portland, Oregon, USA
→ July 2023-Aug 2023 ABRAZO / Verum Ultimum Gallery / Portland, Oregon, USA
→ June 2023-Sept 2023 NOISE / Red Noise Collective / New Mexico, USA
→ May 2022 2012-Ten years after / Ephéméride Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ May 2019 ART + ANARCHY MTL #13 / Cultural Center George-Vanier / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ May 2017 ART + ANARCHY MTL # 11 / Cultural Center George-Vanier / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ May 2013 SCANDALS / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ May 2012 ART + ANARCHY MTL # 6 / Crystal Racine Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ October 2011 Failing Revolutions / Exi / Copenhagen, Danemark
→ May 2007 ART + ANARCHY MTL #1 / Esplanade Art Project / Montreal, Qc, Canada
→ October 1997 Designed Furniture & Abstract Art / BELGO Gallery / Montreal, Qc, Canada
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→ April 2023 Collectors Art Prize – Contemporary Art Curator Magazine – Europe
https://www.collectorsartprize.com/awarded-artists/benot-tremblay
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Born in 1975, in Canada Montreal’s south-west boroughs, Benoît Tremblay aka BENT is a self-taught artist who started is professional career in 1997, punctuated with lots of hiatus and still today doesn’t fully lives out of his art practice on a daily basis. He produces images in the vein of abstraction mixed with visual poetry embracing political and social thoughts. Highly influenced by Abstract Expressionism as well as the European post-war avant-garde, he tries his best to paint and draw images that keeps intriguing his vision of life and try to slightly disturb the certainties that people can have about art, more specifically about abstract art.
He sincerely loves to push the boundaries of his art practice into some provocative thoughts into his titles or little messages he sometimes wrote besides a painting or an oeuvre. He principally works on canvas and papers, all kind of papers. Even some he founds into the garbage or every surroundings. As for the canvas, he didn’t bought some in this last 11 years, since he found them everywhere he can find some and restore them as much as he can. Since 1997, he had a little less than 10 solo exhibits and participated in a dozen collective shows. He also participated in an art residency in Rekjavik, Iceland, in 2015.
He still lives and works in Montreal, in the Villeray area, where his studio is right underneath the house where he lives with his almost 20 yrs long, life companion and their 2 little daughters. He tries his best to speak and write in English, but he’s a lot more fluent in French.
As the Dutch painter Bram Van Velde said so brilliantly: ''I need to go towards the illogical. This world we live in crushes us. It is still governed by the same laws. We must create images that do not belong to him. Who are totally different from those he offers us.''
And I truly hope that people who look at my works can see and feel these few lines, after minutes of meticulous looks. Abstraction isn’t apolitical, nor is either just some child’s play of imagery, but it is a statement in itself about the state of the world in every era.
