Paul Béliveau

The work of French-Canadian artist Paul Béliveau explores themes of history and literature through photorealism. His large-scale oil paintings fuse iconic imagery and nontraditional subject matter allowing the viewer to interpret the interaction of the two. “In Paul Béliveau's paintings, the play of juxtaposition is not the result of a random accumulation of images. Rather, it converges towards an idea of structure or of system, an organized assemblage of elements responding to each other and building upon each other." Les Humanites XXII (2003) pays homage to the great poets and thinkers of the mid-19th century. Here Béliveau depicts the classic work of French poet Charles Baudelaire, Les Fleurs du mal, and Arthur Rimbaud’s Poesies, une Illuminations, publications recognized for their influence on creative change and expression during the Romantic period in Europe. Most notably stationed at the centre of the painting is Van Loon’s biographical text on the life of Rembrandt van Rijn, with an illustration of the Anatomy Lesson of Dr. Nicolaes Tulp (1631), a work that emphasizes crucial historical events and discoveries while underlining the role of the arts in history. Together these examples merge on canvas as Béliveau’s didactic ode to modernism demonstrates the effects of art and literature on the artist’s creative development.