‘’A photographer, a painter, a sculptor… I am all of these”.
Martin Rondeau is a mixed media artist who lives and works in Montreal. He disrupts photography by breaking away from the traditional, two-dimensional plane, using a process of severing, weaving and shaping to transform his initial images into a new artistic medium, one that ultimately renders a different meaning; a distorted, sculptural, painterly form that confuses the eye and creates a visual ambiguity, a lack of reference and an inability to situate oneself. There is a sense of timelessness in this work, a concurrent deconstruction and reconstruction of visual composition, as the backgrounds and shapes twist, fold and pixelate to craft new readings.
Photography is not just a simple medium that translates into what I see. It doesn’t uniquely function as a mediator between eye and subject. To me, it is a material used to reconstruct a chosen work. I love to disrupt and art leaves no choice but to satisfy this desire.
Rondeau’s artistic corpus is divided into several series, and it is in the large format that the images takes form. The human body, the taboo and “things left unsaid” are some of the themes he prefers to engage with and explore. His surgical reconstruction of different physiognomies converge curved bodies and finely formed faces to realize a new vision for beauty, while the collage like manipulation of the physical materials metamorphosize Trompe-l’oeil illusions, pushing the boundaries of what photography can be.
With a background in fashion photography, Martin Rondeau has been immersed in the visual arts scene for the past thirty years, exhibiting his work in renowned galleries around North America, Europe and important international art fairs, such as Art Basel. His works are found in private and public collections around the globe.