Born and raised in Montreal. I consider myself a cultural product of the cold-war, space-race, and oil embargo era. I took an early interest in art and technology at a very young age. I can even remember making a gas mask in art class out of cardboard at the age of nine. I built a satellite out of scrap wood and found objects in the family back yard one Summer, only to realize decades later that I was actually making sculptures, similar to those cargo-cult tribes fashioning single-engine airplanes out of straw; there was a naiveté to it.
Later on, in the 1980s, I studied painting and sculpture in Montreal, I then lived two years in Houston where I was invited to work as an artist in residence as part of a program setup by their museum of fine-arts. Since my return to Montreal in the late 1980s, I have been continuously developing and nurturing themes and styles that are t
he Master key signatures of my artwork.
My work primarily concentrates on core subjects such as human mutations, apocalyptic landscapes, the cold-war stigma, the space-race, the techno/military/industrial reality, the supernatural, and hybrid techno-devices to name a few. My work invariably is concerned with the incomprehensibly unhealthy, wasteful and destructive side-effects produced by a technologically driven, trapped and hypnotized culture. Thus, exposing as it were, the flip-side of our techno-triumphalist world. In the mid 1990s, though I still continued working in traditional media, I became very interested in and enamored with 3D computer animation. Through a convoluted path, I ended up working for Softimage, a well-known 3D computer animation software company. I consider that period to be my ‘Darth-Vader’ phase, as I lived and metaphorically ate computers/3D twenty four hours a day. I feel though that the 3D experience helped influence and push my art in a very different direction, and into a new paradigm.
I continue to live and work in Montreal…
Pierre Duranleau
Everything is Art Issue-V (p.67.)
FilterForge Profile: https://www.filterforge.com/more/customer-stories/pierre-duranleau.html