Yvan Genest
Montreal-born painter Yvan Genest has developed a distinctive figurative language shaped by decades of practice between Montreal and Puerto Vallarta. After an early career as a touring musician in Europe, Genest turned fully to painting, drawing on Mexican visual culture and expressionist traditions. His works present enigmatic, mask-like figures—part icon, part talisman—rendered with vivid colour and gestural force. Genest’s paintings are held in collections across Canada, the United States, Mexico, and Europe.As an artist for 40 years, Yvan Genest paints in his Puerto Vallarta studio for 22 years, as well as in Montreal (his hometown), while remaining very active in the French and American art scenes. His work attracts an international circle of collectors seduced by the contemporary and timeless strength of his iconography.
His career had unconventional beginnings. At first, his artistic temperament drove him to music. As a songwriter, musician and singer, he toured throughout Europe for many years, until he discovered painting, where he found an unforeseen ground for his fertile imagination. A first trip to Mexico in 1985 led him to discover the profound spirituality of Mexican art.
Yvan’s maverick personality drove him to explore all paths of visual arts and develop his unique, shamanic and timeless imagery. He has diverse influences, from Mexican popular culture and Expressionism to contemporary free-form figurative painting.
"My paintings are characters that gaze at us and seem to come from a spiritual world. They evoke a sense of strange poetry, energy, and strength, like talismans.
I do not choose the characters in my paintings; they impose themselves during a long process of metamorphosis. They occupy the canvas like actors on a stage. The subject of the piece is unknown to me; I am more of a costume designer than a playwright. However, I sense that their presence may be a metaphor for the great mystery of our journey on Earth.
The more I paint, the more the painting decides for me, as if I am serving something greater than myself."
