Michel Picotte

Incredibly joyful and lively, Michel Picotte’s mixed media works combine found objects and a brilliant palette, with words and symbols in an expressive pastiche. Patterns, rapid strokes and dribbles of paint flow across a picture plane that is often segmented into equal parts of two or three. There is a wonderful playfulness and experimental feeling evoked by Picotte’s work, as if the audience and artist are experiencing the full joy of creation for the very first time. The emotive, raucous energies aroused by Picotte’s strong creative independence and romantic disposition have been harnessed into a positive action of art, without digressing into narcissistic storytelling. Instead, audience members are able to muse and wonder at each work; themselves participating in the process of artistic dialogue.

Since the 1970s, his work has been exhibited frequently in group and solo shows throughout North America and Europe. Picotte divides his time between his main studio in Montreal, Canada and another in the countryside outside of Coutances, France.