Rue Saint-Jean-Baptiste
July 31 to August 24
Thursday to Sunday, 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
_Gros et détail Kaël Mercader's project will take the form of an intervention on the walls of a house. The artist will paint a mural on the interior walls of a house, where he will be staying, and offer it to the public. He aims to offer popular painting in the noblest sense of the term, and to pay tribute to Chicoutimi artist Arthur Villeneuve (1910-1990) who had painted every wall of the house where he lived with his family, and opened it to a variety of visitors.
Kaël Mercader's painting is on the threshold between popular art and contemporary painting, and the landscape is often represented. The Symposium's context presents characteristics dear to the artist's heart, as he spends his summers in the countryside, where he creates many drawings and paintings. Although his work is primarily figurative, Mercader is always playing with the idea of upsetting - or at least jostling - the viewer's expectations. He plays with the idea of pleasing the eye, but also systematically including a discrepancy.
_Biography Kaël Mercader was born in Quebec City in 1989. He lives and works in Montreal, where he devotes most of his time to painting, but also to film animation and illustration. He has taken part in numerous group exhibitions across the province, and recently presented his first solo show “Du Pain pour les Peintres” at the Chiguer Art Contemporain Gallery. He made his first animated film "Ductile et Pluvial" during an artist residency in animation at l'écran d'épingles à la Bande-vidéo in 2022. His film had its world premiere at the Sommets du Cinéma d'Animation in 2023. He was awarded the Videre Relève prize in visual arts in 2018.
_Approach Kaël Mercader has been drawing, performing and illustrating for many years. Today, painting has become his principal medium. His paintings feature characters in action, evolving within pastoral and bucolic landscapes. Drawing on his memories, dreams and on the accounts of those close to him, he captures the simple pleasures of vacations: moments of leisure, relaxation and carefree living. Like memories altered by the passage of time, incongruous and anachronistic elements invite themselves into these scenes, lending them a touch of strangeness, humor and nostalgia. Multiplying references to art history, he seeks to provoke emotions in the viewer such as laughter, anxiety or a feeling of déjà-vu. He transcribes natural phenomena such as the effects of light and the kinetics of animals and plants. His artistic practice revolves around play, pleasure and dreams.
