Buckhead Village: Artworks on Display : Explore the Current Space

There are painters who describe a surface, and painters who build one. Sylvain Tremblay is the second kind. Born in Quebec City and trained first as a graphic designer and illustrator before committing to painting full time in 2002. What that decision produced was not a painter in the conventional sense. It was something closer to a sculptor who works against a wall.

His process begins with modeling paste, a dense, sculptural medium that accumulates and dries three-dimensionally rather than sitting flat on the support. He layers acrylic into and over this built surface, working color against the relief he has already constructed, and seals the result in a high-gloss varnish that gives each finished work the luminosity of a cast object. The forms carry the influence of Alberto Giacometti: roughly described, elongated, caught somewhere between definition and gesture, as though the figure were being recalled rather than precisely rendered. His subjects draw from the natural world and from the presence of human life within it, the meeting point of living forms, landscape, and time.

Tremblay lives and works in Dubai, where his practice has grown in both scale and reach. In 2014 he created a large outdoor fresco in the Dubai desert in celebration of local traditions. He represented Canada at the G20 Summit in China in 2016, participated in the "Personal Structure" exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 2017, and contributed work to the opening of the Canada Pavilion at the 2020 World Expo in Dubai. His work is held and exhibited across Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia, and the Middle East.