ABOUT...
Guy Sénécal is a unique artist...
At first glance, the artist’s love for the human form and for vibrant colour is immediately apparent.
Clearly, Sénécal is an exceptional colourist, one of those who master chromatic harmonies just as a composer masters the delicate chords of a score, whose complex balance teeters on the brink of dissonance.
From the outset, one suspects the artist of surrendering the motif to colour, much like Matisse, who asserted that ‘beautiful blues, beautiful reds, beautiful yellows stir the sensual depths of mankind’.
For Sénécal, as for his acknowledged master, colour is not a complement to form, but a value, a means of expression in its own right.
The eye wanders across the painting, discovering here a secret message, there an unusual little scene; a rainbow appears between the lovers, cats and birds chase one another playfully amongst the flowers, colourful and joyful figures entwine in a mischievous tenderness… and all this without the slightest regard for perspective.
Guy Sénécal’s work forms part of this contemporary movement that emerged some thirty years ago, commonly known as ‘Art singulier’.
‘Singular’ art to assert its difference, on the fringes of the unspoken conventions of current contemporary art market practices.
Non-conformist art, if you will, to transcend the indomitable spirit that each of us carries within. Unconventional art, today more than ever, to champion the idea of art that is simple and beautiful, popular without any negative connotations, accessible directly through the heart just as much, if not more so, than through reason, and yet highly symbolic. Herein lies one of the strengths of this work.
Gently, almost unobtrusively, whether through a couple of lovers entwined, golden flowers or a tree of hearts, it touches upon that part of childhood that remains within each of us, yet takes us beyond this visible ‘naivety’, this sort of primitive expressionism, into the heart of a meaningful imagination.
In Sénécal’s work, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions are closely intertwined. Hence the dual nature of the gift that the artist bestows upon his creation, like a sacred passing on of what has been given to him towards an encounter with the other.
Hence, too, the choice of figurative art which, he says, by depicting man restores him to his humanity, conveys values, and nourishes him positively… and offers the viewer universal keys to values that are no less universal.
Sénécal’s art cannot be equated with art brut. For whilst the ‘art brut’ artist expresses, without concern for being seen or understood, the irrepressible need to externalise his vision of the world by giving it material form, Sénécal has reflected at length on the meaning of the act of painting, both for the creator and for the viewer.
Behind the spontaneity of creation, directly rooted in emotional experience, lies nothing less than an art of resistance, if not of protest – an act of militant poetry and humanism.
If Guy Sénécal’s art is unique, it is not so much in a conscious resistance to the art establishment—which, ultimately, for the professional artist that he is, makes little sense— but in the synthesis of the senses and of meaning that he achieves, leading him to conceive of his art as an act of faith and a poetic act, driven by a fierce determination to breathe sensitive humanity (the heart and the face, the image and colour) back into art.
In this idealistic stance, which fortunately sidesteps the pitfall of dogmatism, Guy Sénécal is convinced that poetry can change the world.
His works speak of love, life and happiness as ethical messages that are crucially vital today.
Marie Deparis.