Paul Béliveau

With more than one hundred solo exhibitions across Canada, the United States and Europe, Paul Béliveau has been exhibiting his art for over forty years. Known for his meticulous nature and aesthetic accuracy, Béliveau’s approach to painting is an extension of “pictorial archeology,” in that his work references a database of thousands of personal and historical photographs, mementos and vestiges. One focus that the artist steadily returns to is his depiction of books - book spines especially – some from his own book collection, but mostly from his own extensive library of imagination.

Concerned with perception processes, how humanity manages to explores ideas that are not in our present environment, or perhaps not even real, and finally, how these systems come to life through composition, Béliveau’s paintings are never meant as end points.  On the contrary, they reveal themselves to be outlines, sketches and creations which are constantly evolving. Consequently, it is not the images themselves, but the unique process of creative development, which accords Paul Béliveau's works their originality. The conscious system of construction that goes into Béliveau’s creation, does not afford any sense of indiscrimination, a fact that can be linked to the artist’s fascination with architecture, the way machines work and industrial structures, which he compares, in fact, to living organisms.