DOMINIC BESNER -

Giclees List "Hundred Words"

In his work, the artistic initiative of Besner is completely centered on the transmission of the living and physical energies which surround it. The artist opens in the vibrations of the current society to remodel them in plastic forms, between representation and abstraction. He does not try to create an ideal or to reproduce the nature, but indeed to shape a metaphysical energy in its relationship with human activity. The pictorial subjects create registration of the memory of a living civilization in the long-lasting vehicle that is the work.

Furthermore, the questions and the reflections which feed the art of Besner concern the relationship between the life and the death. The fantastic world that is born on the canvas is the synonym for the fragility of man, the symbol of the short-lived character of life, which both touches and worries him. It is such paleontology that Besner has been in search for the tracks of life, fascinated by the facts that remain after the death. As if to remember its tracks, he gives it several faces in paint.

To give his work an ample emotional personality, and communicate the world which surrounds it, Besner crosses lines and colors both simple and complex in dynamics. The division of the picture in various panes structures the composition and allows the artist to introduce mixtures of colors and textured effects. Such a system of joint connections and motives answer the painting from a pane to another. With these interactions which qualify the atmosphere, the painter manages to pass on the image of society's movements. It is in the heart of the city, in its speed and noises, from which Besner draws these vibrations and in which he modulates the paint. His characters are inevitably soaked with this fast and intoxicating spirit which brings him the urban area. They live in the echoes and in the atmosphere of this city which the painter illustrates by means of colors, lines and motifs. Whether his subject is human, animal or architectural, it will be the plastic result of a dynamic crossing between the figure and the space.

Intellectually structured thanks to the critical glance to which he puts his art, develops during the course of time, the artist is constantly searching for new colors and forms to become the tangible expression of an urban strength. Furthermore, his approach to the work is the one of a pictorial architect: his figures are monumental, they are three-dimensional and they are reflections on the proportions and life between the lines and balance.

In the universe of Besner, the characters are often the real subject.
Let us forget the characterless faces stuck on a painting. Each of the subjects, so diffuse in treatment of colors between the shape and bottom, is distanced inside the space. The face is a concrete shape, a means to enter a dialogue with the spectator and to speak to him about this ample and emotional personality of the world created by Besner.

When the character is the subject, everything is in the glance, the mouth, the projection of the cheeks, the width of the forehead and sometimes even, only, in the angle of the presented head. The global facial expressions are more than the reflection of a personality; they are a reflection of the current world and can belong to each of us. The postures, the headgears and the self-expression through movements follow the movement introduced by the face and give to the work all its eloquent scale.

If the faces of Besner are fragmented, colored and textured, it is because they are the image of the energies drawn from the urban universe of an artist for whom the naturalism is too wise. The emotional atmosphere in the compositions of Besner is a visual passport for a conception of the world renewed, rich and deep, based on the line and the color.

The image resulting from the work of the artist becomes that of a world in itself, exceeding widely the two dimensions of the canvas.

BORN

North Lancaster, Ontario (Canada)

DATE OF BIRTH

 June 9th 1965