Thierry Arcand-Bossé is an accomplished painter who addresses the contradictions of our time through dense and detailed images that are at once innocuous and gritty. Borrowing from various cultural references, he creates images that articulate the most traditional of art historical practices—painting—through the digital world in which we live.
His narrative imagery, which abounds with American references and takes a cinematographic approach that has long characterized his canvases, gradually gives way to confusion with ambiguous perspectives inspired by the screens that fill our world today. His recent meanderings around the planet with the help of Google Earth and Google Street View have given the artist a new take on landscape, but it was the webcam—a window onto the banality of daily life—that has inspired him to take us to the non-places with which we have become familiar. The points of reference are blurred and an air of mystery hovers over these spaces, which, when represented through the paradoxically slow and painstaking art of painting, become captivating and hypnotic.
Arcand-Bossé uses painting to question the nature and abundance of the images that surround us and the language of the Web that has become so entrenched in our habits that it transforms the way we see the world. Painting images appropriated from technology also encourages us to reflect on the pointlessness of the act. Arcand-Bossé positions our relationship to the image in terms of subjugation and alienation.
Thierry Arcand-Bossé was born in 1976 in Quebec City, where he lives and works. He obtained a Bachelor of Visual Arts from Université Laval in 2003. Arcand-Bossé’s work has been exhibited in galleries and artist-run centres around Quebec and he has participated in a number of events including ORANGE: Contemporary Art Event of Saint-Hyacinthe (2009), Quebec City’s Manif d’art (2008), the International Symposium of Contemporary Art of Baie Saint Paul (2007), and the Liverpool Biennial in the United Kingdom (2008). He has received recognition and support for his work through research and creation grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec.
His works is collected by:
Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, CPOA
Desjardins Collection
Loto-Québec
Colart
The City of Quebec
Méduse Collection
Private collections in Canada.
