I am a digital artist (Julien Boily).
This statement, heard from a painter, is dumbfounding. Spontaneously, one would think that painting is light years away from digital art. However, an assertion like that, especially since it comes from Julien Boily, challenges our views.
For over ten years, Boily has been pursuing a multidisciplinary practice whose intermixing of classical painting, popular culture, and technologies has been prompting a reflection deeply rooted in the 21st century. Brilliantly handling temporal and semantic anachronisms, he recontextualizes contemporary referents in a peculiarly coded and connoted pictorial tradition, although using software as tools and research subjects. This approach, conducted with technical mastery, confers a realistic and harmonious tone to his works, which opens the door to the worlds he creates. However, the somewhat improbable hybridization between oil and digital produces a technical and temporal dissonance which shifts the perspective and throws light on the complexity of his work and richness of his statement [...]
Audrey Careau
A publication in collaboration with centre Bang.
Julien Boily
Native of Saint-Gédéon, in Lac-Saint-Jean, Julien Boily lives and works in Saguenay. After receiving an interdisciplinary art degree at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi, he presented over a dozen solo exhibitions in several cities across Quebec and took part in many collective exhibitions and contemporary art fairs in Canada, France, Greece, Sweden Germany, Finland, Hungary and Switzerland . He has been awarded many grants from the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and the Conseil des arts de Saguenay. In 2017, he was named creator of the year in Saguenay–Lac-Saint-Jean and was also among the grantees of the Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation, which recognizes excellence in visual arts throughout the world.
Patrice Loubier
Art critic and professor in the Department of Art History at the Université du Québec à Montréal since 2009, Patrice Loubier has penned many texts for periodicals, collective books, and exhibition catalogues, notably on art intervention and the new forms of public art. His current research focuses on the description as an art form and furtive practices in contemporary visual arts—objects, signs, or acts done more or less anonymously in public contexts.
