PAIN Painting

Richard Jolicoeur (1952-), Ph. D, solitary self-taught artist, was able to reconcile for thirty-five years his work as a teacher and the concrete expression of a double creative passion inspired by the spirit of north-american counter-culture both in his musical (bandcamp/richard jolicoeur) and pictural works. He embodied some of his main pictural concerns during the eighties while he was an active participant in a few collective exhibitions in the National Capital Area as well as in a solo retrospective of his work in 1983 called My heart is large as a pizza. Handling alternately humour, self-mockery, misappropriation as well as the spirit of collage in his pop naïve production, some of his works have found themselves in private collections. For a few years, he also presided the board of directors of the SAHB (). The interest he has shown in the musical experiment process expresses itself alternately through theatral rock (Carnivore : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SydoQwYvK20), noise music and free jazz with Les Vents Fous, a group active in parrallel galeries. This last decade has been dedicated to computer aided music production (CAMP : 6), several musical works available online are testimony to that fact (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pnHSusHPJfw&feature=youtu.be) . Video production is also one indication of his interest for images in musical setting (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CNn-03ZKJk), for poetry and spoken words (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pb0t5xZvIS8) and even for complete production of corporate videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yVT4nx6gjN4). 2013 marks a return to the practice : «I did a painting in the way of Jackson Pollock and I realized that it was the same painting I did 25 years ago… so I went back to painting, to paint new things.». And, as stated judiciously by Rod Stewart’s third album’s title, Every Picture Tells a Story (1971), Jolicoeur tries to express in his new vintage-flavoured production simple ideas that will sometines make the beholder smile because of their naivety and studied contrats or by obvious references. The artist signs and leave you only judges.