Sylvain Roberge

Personal History

Roberge was born in 1976 in Val-des-Sources, a town in southeastern Quebec that was previously called Asbestos because of the dangerous and cancer- causing mining for the mineral that took place here for over a century. He would live here until the age of 7 before moving to Victoriaville, a city in the middle of Montreal and Quebec City, after the death of his mother. Age 11 is when a young Sylvain began taking art classes after school and started to oil paint, although he admits that art did not have much of an influence on his life at the time, save for drawing cartons for friends and a girlfriend. The influence of art began in earnest when he restarted art lessons doing portraiture with dry pastels at 16 years old, then restarted oil paintings and decided to make a career of it by going to Dawson College in Montreal for Fine Arts. He knew then that painting would be his life.

Today, Sylvain Roberge is considered one of the true visionaries of the art world because, in large part, his work is not tied to trends or fads. Instead, Roberge uses a blend of both timeless and ever- evolving techniques in a quest for new methods of displaying genuine emotion through his art. He uses the encaustic medium, a wax-based painting medium that originated with the ancient Greeks over 3000 years ago. Through a vigorous application of paint and expressive brushwork, the artist is forced to make his paintings more gestual in nature. Because it dries so fast, his quick brush strokes inject the artwork with what Roberge calls the Energy Line, the representative movement of wind or spacial dimension. His goal as an artist is to keep his paintings alive and full of life by not crystalizing the image and by keeping the foundation of his work abstract.
You will see this in the unique texture Roberge creates with the action of painting with hot beeswax. He allows it to drip in multiple layers, creating almost a three-dimensional illusion.
In his Glamour Girls series, Roberge pays homage to the eternal muse of women through a sense of fashion and beauty, along with a mystical aspiration conveyed through warm, mouth-watering colors and a modular touch that reveals both an outward sensuality and the discrete interiority of the models. These works are technically masterful but also represent a sense of modernity, seduction, and mystery through the use of light, expressive movement, and by painting voluptuous complexions with thoughtfully chosen accessories that are painted along with the women. Sylvain Roberge’s art can be candid or sensual, glossy on canvas or engrained on wood, and warm or bold, but it will always provoke emotion in the viewer. He’s an exemplary talent poised to become a global sensation.

Roberge has seen his work exhibited in March of 2011 at the International Art Expo in New York and he won the 2008 Price of Artist Recruitment Award from the Cimon Galleries in Quebec. Some of his paintings are a part of the Osum Oil Sands Corporation’s collection in Calgary, Alberta.