Luc Martineau is a self-taught visual artist with a successful career in the legal world. Painting has been his main professional activity since 2022. His studio is located at Complexe du Canal Lachine, in the Saint-Henri district of Montreal. His first solo exhibition “Jugement Final Judgment” (Ottawa, galerie Alpha Omega) was a great success , while he has also participated in numerous group exhibitions in Quebec.
O Luc Martineau:
“I have no university training in the visual arts. That’s a fact. Yet the arts are part of my DNA. I had a career as a lawyer before becoming a judge, but I’ve never stopped being what I am at heart: an artist and a poet. I’ve been writing and drawing since childhood. As a young adult, I dabbled in watercolor and pastel, then moved on to oil painting. Since 2005, acrylics have been my medium of choice. “
“Without beauty, like love, life has no meaning. For all is illusion, all is sign, all is art, all is God. My imagination knows no limits. More than a mental process, my soul connects with the unspeakable when I stand before a blank canvas or a blank page. Painting becomes a magical conduit that transforms me into Merlin the Enchanter, which is both marvellous and liberating!”
o Josette Trépanier, painter, sculptor and teacher :
“Luc Martineau is a self-taught artist. Despite a career in the legal profession, he has always drawn, painted watercolors and produced numerous caricatures. However, it wasn’t until the early 2000s that his painting career really took off. In his Saint-Henri studio, he produces works on canvas or paper that are astonishing in their eclecticism. Far from confining himself to one style or genre, what he seeks above all in painting is emotional intensity, and to this end he uses all the technical resources at his disposal: impasto, dripping, collage, repetition and quotation. He also indulges in writing and drawing exercises that help uncover his unconscious. In this way, he has integrated the values of the American Abstract Expressionists, and even, closer to home, the artists of Refus Global, who favored spontaneity, authenticity, gesture and the influence of the subconscious.”
“In his studio, Luc Martineau freely explores “ways of making worlds”, to use Goodman’s phrase. Some of his more figurative works echo the New Free Figuration, Bad Painting and New German Expressionist movements that marked painting in the ’80s. In other, more recent works, we can now see the beginnings of a social commentary. That’s why it’s hard to know in which direction Luc Martineau’s artistic practice will evolve. The mixture of styles, the hybridization of forms, the references to the past and the affirmation of subjectivity that characterize his production, lead to an individualization of his artistic practice in which we detect no concern to belong to any artistic current. Luc Martineau is a free electron.” (translated from French to English)
