Bio

Born in St-Hyacinthe in 1961, François Desnoyers is a painter and digital artist who grew up in Montreal, Quebec. He graduated from Concordia University in 1989. In the mid-90s, he relocated to Montreal’s south shore where he currently lives and works.

He is best known for his figurative practice which combines expressive and textured brushstrokes with well defined drawing lines. The artist foregoes depicting human interaction in favor of interrogating the effects of time on our perception of reality, thus pitting the concept of truth against the faculties of perception and memory, often translating this struggle into feelings of loss, foreboding and nostalgia.

A series of distinctive paintings, begun during the late 90s and grouped under the title Memories, was showcased in his first important solo exhibitions in Montreal, at Lieu Ouest gallery in 2000 and then at la Maison de la culture Côte-des-Neiges in 2001.

Since 2015, a desire to create a series of paintings in line with the current and growing climate crisis slowly brought Desnoyers to explore the landscape genre with a non-conventional approach to surface, thus stretching the boundaries of the genre. For the Rag Lands series, he replaced canvas with old rags, used bed sheets and other discarded industrial fabric to signal degradation, precarity as well as to create an aesthetic based on the representation of filth, thus introducing a special harmony of purpose between the material and the subject matter.

Desnoyers has garnered recognition through various solo and group shows in Canada and abroad. In 2007, he took part in the 21^st exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the Chapelle Saint-Benoit d’Argenton-sur-Creuse (France). In 2006, he participated in numerous group shows: the New Art Barcelona exhibit (Spain), the 25^th exhibition of paintings and sculptures at the municipal museum of Ourense (Spain) and the Montreal Festival of Japanese & Canadian Current Art (Canada). He also attended some art fairs in the US: at New Art Miami in 2004 and in 2003 at the Affordable Art Fair in New York.

His work is part of various private, corporate and public collections, such as the Lavalin corporate collection which is now owned by the Montreal Museum of contemporary art.