Contemporary painter Diane Desmarais was born in Hull in 1946. She graduated from the École des beaux-arts de Montréal in 1969. Desmarais's canvas paintings are distinguished by the sensuality of her subjects (slender, androgynous, contorted figures), her mastery of the medium, the strength of her compositions, and the subtle use of color and lines. Diane Desmarais's paintings immerse us in a land of shadow and light, truth and lies, love and hate.
A thematic, imaginary and sensual painting
“Passion and the condition of love, with all that this implies, are an integral part of Diane Desmarais’s work. In fact, each painting becomes a stage on which the interactions between the characters are played out through back-and-forths where the power struggles exult in the voluptuousness of love. Her line, always sensual and elongated, and her ochre chromatic palette inevitably plunge the spectator into a world of the Arabian Nights, in which the body and soul melt into long, sensual Shakespearean laments…” Robert Bernier
Quebec painter Diane Desmarais has participated in solo, duo and group exhibitions while continuing to paint in various studios: Canada (Vancouver, Toronto, Montreal, Quebec City, Hull, Ottawa), United States (Santa Fe, Atlanta, San Diego, San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York), Africa (Lamu, Nairobi), Belgium (Brussels), Japan (Tokyo), Thailand (Pipi Island, Bangkok), Spain (Barcelona, Malaga). She exhibits her paintings in Canada, the United States, Africa, Asia and Europe. Her works are part of several private and public collections around the world.
ADDITIONAL ARTICLE(S):
Diane Desmarais (1946)
Characters with highly stylized, elongated, fluid bodies intertwine in an open, monochrome, and refined space. The lines are fine, and the gesture that guides them betrays a certain feverishness. This singular universe is that of Diane Desmarais: a sensual world contained in a bubble, prisoner of its fantasies and passions. The body is the hostage, locked in its gilded cage. A cage whose materiality is the jailer, with the illusions it maintains about the meaning of life by suggesting that the finality comes through ecstasy, that the body's only quest is the one by which it tries to capture pleasure, or even keep it captive, just for itself.
But there is a price to pay for this temporary nirvana, for this pleasure in transit. This price is the struggle; the wounds are numerous, the pains countless, the tears sometimes inexhaustible. The goal? To reach, even if only for a precious moment, even a very short one, the peak of contact, the orgasm, the fusion between bodies, but above all that of beings intertwined, together forming an indestructible vessel leading to eternity, that of the present. But the body ages, passions pass, and desires fade. What does it matter that the quest never ends? It will only be a greater epic.
Source: Robert Bernier, La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2002, Desmarais Diane Desmarais (1946), pages 253-254.
