Michel T. Desroches | palette of emotions

In his studio-home in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, the painter-illustrator Michel T. Desroches strives tirelessly to make his canvases vibrate, seeking to transmit these shock waves to his audience. Its vectors: faces, hands and bodies, composed or recomposed, at the service of emotion and expressiveness. A long-time mental health worker, he was able to tap into this reservoir to promote his work, from California to Asia.

Sylvain Sarrazin
The Press

When the artist invited us to his studio, easels, brushes, sketches and paint stains had colonized almost everything there, from floor to ceiling. In a blind spot: a bed. Because it is also his place of life, shared with his wife, Louise. Do they live in the workshop or does the workshop reside in their home? Maybe the combination of the two…

On the walls and furniture, strange roommates have set up their nest: figures, characters and hyperexpressive abstract representations, emotional stained glass windows that are explosive and sketched with intensity, captured in canvases or crystallized on paper. With, systematically, an omnipresent line, sinuous like the baton of an orchestra conductor oscillating between largo and presto.

“Often, paintings can be very beautiful, but static. The line that I use, which is a bit my signature, gives a vibration to the characters and expressions, to create a dialogue with the person who will look at them”, dissects the artist from an industrial district of Montreal — the smell of gasoline, which hovered in his neighborhood of youth, filled him with nostalgia. A corrosive side assumed, and even sought: “I want to provoke a reaction, something that will challenge every day. Avoid that, placed in a living room, we no longer see the painting after two months. »

A client had one day brought him a canvas, deemed “too intense”. A week later, he had changed his mind and got it back; she had already created a void in her living space. “The intensity that I put into it transfers to it, I don’t do something that tries to match the flavor of the month,” Desroches brandishes.

Although an admirer of Giacometti and Klimt, among others, he has modeled, kneaded and refined his own style for several decades, forging his own artistic traits from those of others. “The face and the character are endless: although we always produce new ones, it will never really be the same emotion. Over time, we find subtleties, we manage to find, with one line less or more, a more subtle emotion”, says the man who also devotes himself to sculpture.

After hundreds of canvases produced over several decades, the painter decided to devote himself full-time to his art since 2017, after signing a contract with a gallery in Los Angeles. His paintings have also packed their bags in recent years, at art fairs (art fairs) and exhibitions, from China to Spain, including Florida; culminating in the exhibition of 50 works of his own at the Yellowstone Art Museum, Montana, in 2019.

Webs and sanity

Michel T. Desroches has his studio, but also his workshops: for ten years, he led art-therapy sessions with L’Écrile de l’Amitié, an NPO supporting people struggling with mental health problems. . He thus supported groups, some of which came from the Lafontaine hospital, to transfer their feelings on canvas and paper. “Their stigma caused them to have no self-esteem, but art therapy gave them some. You could clearly see the results, it was almost a medicine. To create a work of art is to dissociate oneself from oneself: putting a part of them on the sheet led them to have another perspective on themselves”, recalls the artist.

A relationship that was not simply one-sided, since rubbing shoulders with the participants of these workshops provided him with a real reservoir of emotional raw material. “As we are a bit like sponges, these people transmitted to me an emotion that I could capture”, narrates the one who says he likes the “edgy” side and “the thin line between madness and genius”. He himself ended up breaking the dike of his own psychology: in 2015, after years of black and white, color finally irrigated his works. “As if, until then, I didn’t dare to reveal my own emotions in my works”, he philosophizes.

art on fire

Being a creator does not exclude being also a destroyer: when we met, Desroches was preparing to set fire to part of his production of drawings, the quality of which was deemed insufficient in his eyes – an unprecedented ritual for him. Let’s say that his prolific and disciplined side, coupled with his “daily gymnastics” (he performs several drawings every morning, some of which will be carried on canvas), led him to accumulate entire boxes of works. “At some point, sorting becomes necessary, for the sake of quality and out of respect for my customers and collectors. I only keep the best,” he explains, holding a box containing a hundred drawings that will end up in ashes.

A few minutes later, in the heart of the splendid Cigales vineyard, not far from his workshop in Saint-Jean-sur-Richelieu, he joined the action to the word by throwing into the flames, without trembling, hundreds of hours of work. ” No regrets ! I even feel lighter now,” he says as he watches the paper turn to ashes. The painter even says he is ready to repeat the ritual with canvases. Enough to rekindle the flame of ambition: having recently freed himself from the exclusive contract signed with the Californian gallery owner, he feels more than ever determined to explore new exhibition territories, in Europe or the United States.