Career

Influenced by Cobra and Dotremont, Michel Mineur paints and engraves Belgian Walloon and Canadian landscapes on media such as maps, newspapers and wallpapers; and also focuses on scenes of feminine intimacy in bedrooms and bathrooms.

Philosophy of my art

When I paint on different types of printed paper it is not for decorative purposes (similar to the cubists who lined their canvases with newspaper fragments around 1912), but rather because their words or lines modify the interpretation of what I paint. Placing a blooming apple tree on a subway map is not just a landscape in spring – I superimpose and oppose two worlds. Two ways of living, or two ways of surviving. I try to stage divergent concepts and ideas through visual means

M. Mineur

Gallery

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Works on printed material

These backgrounds (newspapers, maps or stock certficates) are cold and rigid depictions of modern life, with its fast pace (as symbolized by highways), its rules, and its urban areas. With these as background, I paint or draw the contrasting, stagnant, almost immutable landscapes: fragments of villages, the banks of the Meuse (a river in the Walloon area of Belgium), nudes or semi-nu.

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Written material

I have the same passion for writing, such as letters or administrative mail, as for printed media. These handwritten letters become louvered shutters or fences. I inscribe on it fragments of everyday life or phantom landscapes. The effect is one of a musical score.

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Engravings: from zinc to plastic

In the same vein as my paintings and drawings, working on recycled materials, I mainly engrave with dry point on material that represent traces of our everyday life of the end of the 20th century: CDs, bank or telephone cards and even on parts of oxidized gutter.