Paul Béliveau (b.1954)

A founding member of the artist-run centres La Chambre Blanche and the Atelier de Réalisations Graphiques, as well as the artist co-operative La Maison Longue—where he has maintained his studio since 1994—Paul Béliveau is intrinsically linked to the cultural life of Quebec City. In 2002, he celebrated the city’s history with an urban public artwork titled Les vents déferlants (The Winds Unfurling).

A native of Quebec City, Béliveau pursued his college and university studies from 1972 to 1977, when photorealism was at the height of its popularity on the American and European art scenes. Figuration was reclaiming its place after the sweeping wave of abstraction in the 1950s and 1960s. In Canada, figurative painters such as Alex Colville (1920–2013) and Jean Paul Lemieux (1904–1990) and Pop art proponents like Edmund Alleyn (1931–2004) were at the forefront. As a student at Université Laval’s École d’art, Béliveau stood out for his remarkable skill in reproducing real-world objects with striking precision. He launched his career in 1978 with the exhibition 23 investigations sur un objet usuel (23 Investigations of an Everyday Object)—a series of drawings depicting a paper bag transformed by the objects it contains. From series to series, his work evolved, incorporating references to and quotations from other artists, both contemporary and historical, in large-scale painted works. In 1999, the artist became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

To create the works in the Vanitas series, 2002–24—the most renowned and long-lasting of his series—Béliveau drew on the web as an inexhaustible virtual library. He used online images of books to create his paintings and prints of sections of bookshelves, which produce a dialogue about key moments in Western culture. In the serigraph Vanitas I, 2011, the acrylic painting Vanitas 19-04-20, 2019, and the other pieces in this series, scholarly tomes sit alongside artist monographs, exhibition catalogues, novels, and more. The artist brings the books into conversation while meticulously recreating their new or aged appearance.

Béliveau has received several public art commissions, the most famous of which is Les vents déferlants. On one of the capital’s busiest thoroughfares, rue Honoré-Mercier, the artist erected six tall columns, or masts, topped with weathervanes rigged with sails. This allegorical work references Jacques Cartier’s ships, which arrived in 1535 at the village of Stadacona—a settlement destined to become one of the largest port cities in North America. The weathervanes are shaped like church spires and gilded as though sacred objects, symbolizing the influence of the Church on the city, once the centre of French Catholic power in New France.