Px (c) – Benoit Depelteau (*1977), Contrecoeur, Québec, Canada.
Benoit Depelteau studied art for four years, working mainly with prints and video.Today he works as a free-lance artist and teacher for visually impaired children.

He started making collages at 17 and later, in art school, used collage techniques in his sketches for paintings as well as for his screen print matrices. It was also during his studies that he met an inspiringteacher who encouraged him to produce art on a daily basis, using whatever he had at hand, thus further triggering the passion for collage as his preferred medium.

Influenced by dada, fluxus and pop culture imagery, Ben sees his art as a “critical and cynical point of view wrapped up in a bubble gum aesthetic”. His main interest in collage are the visual relations of objects and spaces in a work, the contrasts in textures and finishes that create new meanings. He also enjoys working with text snippets taken from their original context, placing them with unrelated images to play with their connotations.

Ben’s starting point for a piece of collage is usually an image he stumbles upon and which he associates in some way with a picture he already has in store. The rest is a question of balancing them with further elements to give objects and the space between them an equal presence in the final composition.