Belzile, Louis

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Louis Belzile, a great contemporary painter

A Quebec painter and sculptor from the Plasticiens group, Louis Belzile was born in Rimouski in 1929 (died in 2019). Between 1940 and 1948 he studied at the Séminaire de Rimouski and then he studied at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto. In 1953 and 1954, he took lessons at the André Lothe studio in Paris. In 1958, he obtained a Bachelor of Arts from the Université de Montréal. In 1960-1961, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal.

Contemporary Canadian works

"Louis Belzile, along with Fernand Toupin, Jauran (Rodolphe de Repentigny) and Jean-Paul Jérôme, was part of the initial movement of visual artists who, in 1955, on the occasion of a notable exhibition at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts, launched the Manifesto of Visual Artists. Since the early 1940s, Quebec and Canadian painting had been experiencing a great creative effervescence, where abstraction claimed to be the language of pictorial renewal. There were many debates between the proponents of figuration and those of abstraction and even between sympathizers of both schools of thought. It was in this electrifying context that Louis Belzile asserted himself as a painter of modernity. His painting retained all the rigor of composition from his visual artist past. Over the years, his language has been enriched with a gestural flexibility that constructs light through a dreamlike quality evocative of his inner world." Robert Bernier
Contemporary artist Louis Belzile said: "There is in my painting a kind of sympathy between the sun, the sea and my inner world. I love the bright light of the Bas-du-fleuve, and I have a strange notion of time and space, a space in motion, a time at rest. I feel like a sun worshipper." From the 1980s, Louis Belzile composed paintings around more or less significant dark masses (darkness and matter) and radiant light.

A Quebec painter, Louis Belzile's works are featured in many public and private collections. His paintings are exhibited in the main museums of Quebec and Canada.

ADDITIONAL ARTICLE(S):

Louis Belzile (1929-2019)

The geometric period of the painter Louis Belzile is relatively short. It was only from the 1950s onwards that he truly approached this language. Until then, he had designed paintings of a traditional style and a few of cubist inspiration, but his works always retained a recognizable link with physical reality. In the early 1950s, he studied with the French artist André Lothe, an experience that left traces in his production at the time. The creation of works linked to the movement of plastic artists stopped in the early 1960s. Subsequently, he designed a few paintings in which light asserts itself in its literal transcription. This short series announces the language that he would make his own from the mid-1970s.

In the meantime, Belzile approaches two trends that are practically opposite to each other. One, on the edge of figuration, produces architectural landscapes with a geometric and outlined style, sometimes animated by an undulating touch, while the other is frankly figurative and symbolic. When he returns to non-figurative painting, it is in a very suggestive way, in canvases where light plays an important descriptive role. It is a bit as if the artist were offering us a synthesis of the pictorial languages ​​that, since his beginnings, have produced a painting constantly oscillating between a geometric rendering and an expressionist touch.

Source: Robert Bernier, La peinture au Québec depuis les années 1960, Les Éditions de l’Homme, 2002, Belzile Louis Belzile (1929), pages 92-93.

 

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