Éric Tardif

"The Nest" by Eric Tardif has been selected for the international exhibition Birds in Art 2012, at the Leigh Yawkey Woodson Art Museum in Wisconsin from September 8 to November 11, 2012. In all, 125 artists around the world have been selected, including three Canadian artists: Eric Tardif, Chris Bacon and Robert Bateman.


Eric Tardif  A native of Kamouraska, son of the Lower St. Lawrence in Quebec  It is in the creation of photographic atmospheres on the edge of figuration and abstraction that I have tried to express the feeling of wide open spaces and endless horizons. But rather perplexed with the results obtained, I went to scratch the negative of my images in order to get an impression of infinite space by the dissolution of an almost real landscape. My desire is to suggest the lightness of movement.

But more and more, as I decided to express my vision of things, is when, as part of my course of sculpture, that I got the idea to link the dimensions of movement and space in the one area of wood. In my research, as I discovered a technique of steambending, an avant-garde technical and a non-traditional one in Quebec, I came to a singular form of expression where the movement of birds seems to fit in any light in with the pure intimacy of their lives.

Inspired by nature, but also by the art of the Indians of Quebec and Western Canada, I'm sensitive to the expressive possibilities of wood. My passion for birds, their elegance and grace in movement, becomes, for me, as many sources of inspiration that stimulate my imagination, my creation. But the figure remains for me only a starting point, it can not fully communicate my vision without the presence of a certain share led by the evocative impressions of abstraction. Also, my sculptures are "metaphorical", sculpting is as much a matter of capturing the flight of a bird as it is of representing the bird itself. Through research and development of a technique increasingly refined by the choice of one wood over another, my contemporary work remains in a perpetual artistic migration.