Across various media - painting, drawing, photography and video - Yoakim Bélanger highlights the physical appearance of humanity and celebrates its strength, passion and grace.

Yoakim Bélanger revisits and sublimates the ‘plastic thinking’ (Gerhard Richter) of the body by creating a unique dialogue between the material and its medium. Exclusively working on metal as a medium, Yoakim accomplishes a vibrant and textured brushwork where both abstraction and figurative, order and chaos, shade and light are merging in order to reach an ultimate goal: portraying the body through the soul.

The use of metal comes from its link to design and architecture, but also from its organic characteristics: metal holds indeed a memory and an experience that offers to the artist an infinite narrative potential. More than a simple medium, it is also dense and rigid and therefore gives a unique impulse to the liquid magma of the material used (acrylic, ink, resin…). Composing his artwork with layers, Yoakim Bélanger structures and deconstructs by sanding, scraping, and altering the surface and by doing so reveals the energy and the rhythm that lays between all these elements interacting within the creative process.

Yoakim Bélanger thinks of his work from the eye of the filmmaker and the graphic designer that he is. Paying great attention to the layout, the framing, the colours and the interplay between shadow and light, he sublimates the sensuality of each human being and highlights the emotions.

Yoakim Belanger (b.1977) is a multi-media artist who lives and works in Montreal. He is graduated in graphic design from UQAM school of Montreal.