Christian Messier
Christian Messier lives and works in Montreal, where he divides his time between his artistic practice and teaching visual arts at Cégep Édouard-Montpetit. Since the early 2000s, he has presented performances at numerous festivals in Canada and in over a dozen other countries. At the same time, his painting practice, which took off later, has been presented in a number of venues, including l’Œil de Poisson in Quebec City, Regart in Lévis, Verticale – center d’artistes in Laval, L’Écart in Rouyn-Noranda, Clark in Montreal, the UQAC gallery l’Œuvre de l’autre in Saguenay, Maison de la culture de Longueuil, the Centre des arts et de la culture de Dieppe in New Brunswick, Woodbury University in California, as well as five exhibitions at Galerie Laroche/Joncas and numerous participations in the Papier fair and Art Toronto.
His practice focuses on painting, performance and music. In painting, he mainly explores the human presence and its atypical behaviors. He seeks to disrupt symbolic cues to encourage viewers to live a phenomenological experience based on the visual characteristics and non-verbal expressions of the figures present in his works. It’s an immersive experience that affects the viewer’s body, encouraging them to project themselves into the bodies represented through feelings.
Inspired by neuroscience and neurological atypia, such as ADD, introversion, synesthesia or Tourette’s syndrome, the artist regularly uses this theme as the driving force behind his artistic creation. By placing this theme in the background of his works, Christian Messier creates singular pieces whose meaning is flexible and open to interpretation.