Bio
Alexandre Pépin is a Queer french-canadian visual artist born in Tio'tia:ke (Montréal) (1992). Currently completing an MFA in Studio Arts at the University of Texas at Austin (Spring 2022), he holds a BFA in Studio Arts from Concordia University in Montréal (2016). His paintings take root in Barthe’s ideas on the Neutral and in the philosophy and practice of Zen Buddhism (Sōtō). Grant Recipient of the Quebec Arts and Letters Council (2017) and the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation (2019), Pépin participated in residencies at the Vermont Studio Center (2017) and at the Ox-Bow School of Arts (Summer Fellowship, 2021), and showed work through solo and group exhibitions in Canada and the US. His work was recently reviewed in Esse Arts + Opinions (Summer 2021), New American Painting (Issue 156, 2022) and Glasstire (Moya Ford, A commitment to(...), 2022). Future projects include solo exhibitions at the Racecar Factory (Indianapolis) and at Arsenal Contemporary (online).
Statement
Alexandre Pépin explores ideas of impermanence, emptiness and non-attachment to celebrate an immediate and fundamental joy of painting that calls for a refusal of hierarchies within the artistic practice. In doing so, he invites a plurality of references to his work, from Dutch Golden Age Still-lifes to the Nabis, German expressionism, American Tonalism, the Viennese Secession, Transcendentalism and Pattern & Decoration, developing a material language that negotiates a sensibility for the experience of the beautiful with the context of a collapsing world.
Against the great and noble, and also against the cynical, his distemper and oil paintings are attempts to reconcile experiences of happiness and inspiration to ones of desire and suffering. In search of acceptance and equanimity in the everyday, his paintings engage queerness as a profound spiritual experience and invite humour, failure, embodiment and awkwardness as ways to dismantle ever-crystalizing styles, theories and ideologies in his practice.