About
Bio
Sébastien Clermont is a visual artist from Montréal. The trajectory of his artistic career has been intricately linked with travel since its beginning. Inspired by the art, people and mythologies of Mexico, he started drawing and painting. Since then his passion has driven him to undertake artist residencies, mural projects and collective exhibits in Colombia, Guatemala, Spain, Japan and back in Canada.
Artist Statement
Through my work, I explore the underlying connections between humans and their environment, and how myths and symbols can help us map these links. My artistic process of playing with these ideas leads to images that blossom from a place rooted in the unconscious mind. Subject and object often merge in my work, the dissolution of boundaries being a motif I continually turn to as a representation of the relationship between our bodies and the myriad of other entities that pass through us, whether it is microorganisms or ideas.
We are porous after all, and the shapeshifting figures in my work are an exaggeration of this fragility I see in the construct of a unified, impenetrable individual self. Painting is a process in which I seek to step out of the way and let archetypal images emerge through the material. My interest lies in using art as a method of inquiry into the truths about our nature that can only be approached through the ineffable. I believe art shouldn’t be explained or planned consciously, but understood as an immediate experience, both for the artist and the viewer.
It is, for me, a process of discovery and a relationship with a source of meaning that lies beyond the individual, and slowly reveals itself through the image. By asking these visual questions I seek to come closer to an understanding of the thread that runs through human psyches, animal bodies, mycelial networks, the animate force of nature, and reality as a whole.
