Hey Sailor Painting

Born in 1978, Jérôme Rochette is an artist from Quebec City. Who lives and creates in the St-Roch district. These influences range from biology to tattooing, to street art. He paints mainly on canvas with acryl, spray paint,gesso, charcoal and marker. His work is symbolic and narrative. He likes to play with iconography and the sacred. Approach: The paintings of Jerome Rochette aim to spark a dialogue between the portrayal of a given object and the artistic universe that it inhabits. Rochette’s artwork exists in this intrinsic, subjective duality of the medium: The artist strives to translate reality with his materials, while inserting his own perspective into the piece. Rochette has developed a unique artistic language by using multiple layers, styles and techniques, allowing his work to take on a distinct and dynamic tactility. Rochette’s paintings are grounded in a powerful aesthetic through his use of formal elements like colour, texture and layering. With Rochette’s powerful, pure and spontaneous vision at the forefront, the individual fragments of each piece are transmuted into a symbolic whole. The subjects depicted in his artwork conjure a familiar, concrete reality, and the imagery within evokes very powerful concepts, despite not always being tied to a specific theme. It is left up to the mind and the analysis of the observer to link the artist’s interpretation with the material form of the artwork. The work of Jerome Rochette represents a tension between the spontaneity—and the necessary tangibility—of the media used and the uncertainty created by the conceptualization of the subject.