iconTechnique Mixte
With striking energy, Sébastien Larochelle takes us into the stampede arena among free, fiery, dashing, magnificent horses. The artist tames wild horses. He draws and paints them with a rapid, spontaneous, controlled gesture, in perfect harmony with their movement, their strength and their elegance. It updates the rock art of our ancestors. With a unique style and after only 10 years of career, this young artist imposes a recognizable signature on the current art market.
Sébastien Larochelle is above all passionate about drawing. At university, he swapped the lead pencil, which he had used since his childhood, for liquid acrylic. With speed and precision, he draws while letting the paint drip: a kind of very personal dripping. At this same time, he put aside the portraits, nudes and ballerinas that he was accustomed to drawing and, fervent in mythology, sought his motif in the sources of civilization and in the oldest artistic creations of the humanity. He discovered cave painting, its bestiary and more particularly the horse, a dominant figure in Paleolithic art. For more than 10 years, Sébastien Larochelle has shared a fierce and intense complicity with this mythical animal, which allows him to explore and release all his creative energy. With remarkable know-how, he depicts horses so expressive that you think you see them moving. Through a combination of lines and brushstrokes, it is the very essence of the beauty and passion of the horse that the artist brings to life.
Like the rock frescoes where any form of "landscape" is non-existent and in which ritual symbols and often geometric signs are represented, the works on canvas by Sébastien Larochelle present backgrounds populated with very contemporary iconography: logos of brand names. products, small graffiti, signs, which invite a closer reading, into the delicacies of the work. The painter thus updates this art while retaining a sacred dimension. Each of his paintings conceals a sort of ritual. For example, to build his pictorial surface, he begins by assembling pieces of raw canvas by sewing them himself with a machine, giving family symbolism to each seam. And, once the painting is completed, he affixes the initials of his beloved mother who died a few years ago.
Born in Hull in 1974, Sébastien Larochelle first studied visual arts and arts and letters at the CEGEP de l'Abitibi Témiscamingue, then obtained a bachelor's degree in visual arts from the University of Quebec in Montreal. Very quickly his works were presented in galleries in Montreal but also in Western Canada and acquired by numerous private and public collectors in Canada, the United States and Europe. In 2013, the company Cavalia, which puts on breathtaking equestrian shows around the world, chose the works of Sébastien Larochelle to be part of its traveling exhibition.
Collective exhibition
- 2007, La Nocturne des Galeries, Galerie St-Dizier, Montreal
Solo exhibitions
- 2004 - Be mute but speak loud , Resto-café Le Barbare, Montreal
- 2004 - Horse sketch , Restaurant Le Souvenir d'Indochine, Montreal
Media coverage
- Magazin'Art, fall 2009 edition, p. 104-107; Course, summer 2007 edition, article p.56-57
- Course, spring-summer 2009, “Once four at the Beauchamp gallery”, p. 50-51
Public and private collections
- Intact Financial Corporation
- Fiji Communications
- Uni Sélect inc.
- Rocky Mountain Chocolates
- FTQ Solidarity Fund
- Papineauville Veterinary Clinic inc.
- Vallées Veterinary Clinic inc.
- Convectair