René Bégin
Artiste Peintre -
Art figuratif
Address :
Candiac, Québec
Phone number :
514 815-5964
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Biography
Born in Montreal on April 14, 1964.
From a young age, Candiac artist René Bégin was interested in drawing and reproduced everything around him. Trained at the university in graphic design, he leads for 20 years a career in advertising and graphic design. At the turn of the 2010's, he devotes himself more to his passion for visual art and pursues training in acrylic painting. This is the beginning of his career as an artist.
Passionate about history, René Bégin likes to represent moments that have left their mark on people's minds, be it social, sports or musical. He is also inspired by scenes of everyday life. His artistic style belongs to the contemporary figurative movement. His creations are tinged with a Pop-Art influence and occasionally adopt a vintage look. He creates his works using acrylic paint, while exploiting an unusual medium: sports tape or "field hockey tape". This surprising pictorial technique consists of making a work by gluing pieces of sports tape of different sizes and colors. Originating from the Tape Art school, this method, which appeared in the United States in 1989, takes twice as long as painting. Among the few artists using this technique, René Bégin seems to be the only one using sport tape. "I went into a sports store to get my skates sharpened, I saw a rainbow of tape wheels at the back of the store, that was the trigger."
Since 2014, the artist's work has been exhibited numerous times in Montreal, across Quebec, and in New York. Some of his creations have also been used in television series shoots or TV show sets. His work has been the subject of many reports, interviews and articles.
Artistic approach
René Bégin's intention from the start was to bring a story to life through his works. Telling strong moments, common emotions as well as everyday scenes, his works shed as much light on moments of sports and urban history as on simple cultural and social life.
After several years of experimentation and stylistic research, he has developed a new and unusual painting technique using field hockey tape on wood panel that is suitable for the sports scene but also for any other context.
By combining the clean and clear line of the tape with the furtive and uneven stroke of the brush, he creates vivid and colorful canvases with a very unusual rendering. Although he starts with an anticipated framework, there are many accidents along the way, leaving the field open to imprecise gestures that lead him down avenues that are at first sight confusing but often relevant and unexpected. Some works are conceived just in ribbon, others only in acrylic while the rest is a mix of the two techniques. The goal is always to follow a different trajectory for each of my works. I avoid as much as possible the easy recipe...
He defines his style as a contemporary figurative genre that flirts with pop art and vintage art. He is very much inspired by contemporary history from the 50's to today. He likes to capture the human, so it is not uncommon for him to depict crowds. His influences are marked by the social transformations of the '60s, so the JFK, Beatles mainly Paul McCartney and expo67. At the artistic level, he will be greatly influenced by the painters-illustrators of the years '50-60 including Bernie Fuchs, George Bartell and Giorgio Olivetti who have marked the advertising posters before the domination of photography. Artists such as Edgar Degas, Russel Hoban, Andy Warhol, Serge Lemoyne, Léo Ayotte, Jean-Paul Lemieux, Edmund Alleyn, and more recently the Voka's, Randy Saxton, Michael Carson, Kim Cogan, Iris Scott as well as paper artist Claude Lafortune and sculptor Duane Hanson complete his major sources of inspiration and artistic motivation.