Born in Montreal, Michel Cormier's passion for the visual arts started in his teens. While working as a set and prop designer for theatres, bars and discotheques, he participated in live painting events and group exhibitions in the 1980's. His work explores the integration of painting with the 3-dimensional.

Fascinated with the discarded treasures and artefacts along alleyways and abandoned vicinities, Cormier’s creative sense of recycling evolved into the 1990’s production of 2-D and 3-D works. This ''recycling collector'' recovers and gives artistic experimentation to everything that he finds. Is it an environmental issue? Is it a way of dealing with our consumer society? Or does the artist express a deeper passion to bring unity to these daily leftovers in his world of creativity and fantasy?

To obtain unique sculptural effects, Cormier uses recuperated construction materials such as beams, planks, press wood and house paint united on a foundation of shed, closet and accordion doors all recuperated to compile Cormier’s unique sculptural effects.

Transformed and yet familiar, these remnants of odds + ends are applied surface to surface by a process of assemblage to create 2-D murals and 3-D artworks. These integrated patterns offer variable geometric abstractions witch relate to certain urban puzzles or oversized society games. We can also discover strange playful animal forms and cosmicsceneries rendered in colour, or even the archetypal forms of totems emerging from obscure and strange civilizations unknown before.

The narrative evocation of the work tends to stage a play where all the parts seek out to identify and tell a story, to create links with a resolution. This is an unavoidable path for Cormier, from reality to imagination.

Michel Cormier lives and works in his studio in Montreal.