JEAN FRANÇOIS PROVOST

Born in Ottawa in 1976, Jean-François Provost has a Bachelor of Visual Arts from the University of Quebec in Outaouais. He has received several awards and mentions for his work as a painter and has produced nearly twenty individual exhibitions in the past ten years. His work in painting and drawing has been presented in Canada, Austria and Italy. Provost's works can be found in several corporate and private collections in the United States, Canada, Europe and the Middle East .

Provost's painting evolves over series responding to specific formalist concerns. Drawing, being in the artist a gestural manifestation of the unconscious, plays a determining role in the composition of his paintings. He argues that his approach drawing and painting ’goes well beyond the simple execution on a support, in that it requires a detachment from the preparatory drawings, in favor of the composition of the work. The preparatory drawings, executed in a completely automatist in India ink, graphite and red chalk, then cut out, constitute the embryo of a creation which will be built in a completely studied and reasoned way, according to a logic respecting my questions on space and purification’. His work is mainly oriented towards a search for composition through line, depths, mass relations, body language and trompe-l'oeil. Provost defines himself, avant everything, like a plastic surgeon.

Jo-Anne Bouchard, Ph.D - Art historian