ABOUT...
Guy Sénécal is a unique artist...
At first glance, the artist's love for figures and vibrant colours is immediately apparent.
Senécal is clearly an exceptional colourist, one of those artists who master chromatic harmonies like a composer masters the delicate chords of a score, whose complex balance teeters on the edge of dissonance.
From the outset, one suspects that the artist surrenders the motif to colour, much like Matisse, who asserted that "beautiful blues, beautiful reds, beautiful yellows stir the sensual depths of men".
For Sénécal, as for his acknowledged master, colour is not a complement to form, but a value, a means of expression in itself.
The eye wanders across the painting, discovering a secret message here, an unusual scene there, a rainbow appearing between lovers, cats and birds chasing each other playfully among the flowers, colourful and joyful characters intertwining in mischievous tenderness... all without any concern for perspective.
Guy Sénécal's work is part of a contemporary movement that emerged some thirty years ago and is commonly referred to as "singular art".
"Singular" art to assert its difference, on the fringes of the unspoken conventions of current creation in the contemporary art market.
Non-conformist art, if you will, to transcend the irreducible that each of us carries within ourselves. Unusual art, today more than ever, to defend the idea of art that is simple and beautiful, popular without pejorative connotations, accessible directly through the heart as much, if not more, than through reason, and yet highly symbolic. This is where one of the strengths of this work lies.
Gently, casually, between a couple of lovers embracing, golden flowers or a tree with hearts, it touches on that part of childhood that remains in each of us, but takes us beyond this visible "naivety", this kind of primitive expressionism, to the heart of a meaningful imagination.
In Sénécal's work, the aesthetic and ethical dimensions are closely linked. Hence the dual dimension of the gift that the artist gives to his creation, like a sacred transfer of what is given to him to the encounter with the other.
Hence, too, the choice of figuration which, he says, by representing man, restores him to his humanity, transmits values, nourishes him positively... and offers the viewer universal keys to values that are no less so.
Sénécal's art cannot be equated with art brut. For whereas the art brut artist expresses, without concern for being seen or understood, an irrepressible need to externalise his vision of the world by materialising it, Sénécal has long reflected on the meaning of the act of painting, both for the creator and the viewer.
Behind the spontaneity of creation, directly linked to emotional experience, lies nothing less than an art of resistance, if not 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 artistic institution, which, for a professional artist like him, makes little sense, but in the synthesis of the senses and meaning that he creates, leading him to think of his art as an act of faith and a poetic act, in a fierce desire to breathe new life into sensitive humanity (the heart and the figure, the image and the colour) in art.
In this idealistic stance, which fortunately avoids 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.