Étienne Rousseau Étienne Rousseau is a visual artist who lives and works in Quebec City, Canada. His paintings can be found in many countries such as United States, Belgium and Switzerland. He holds a bachelor's and a master's degree in visual arts from Laval University. He already has several exhibitions to his credit, including a collective that was part of the program of Manif d'art 9 - the international biennial of Quebec. Recently, he presented his master's degree solo exhibition: La peinture ce n’est pas que peindre at the Sherpa gallery in Quebec. Soon, he will participate in the 5th edition of Art3f, the international contemporary art fair in Brussels, via the Van Gogh Art Gallery in Madrid. Approach My approach can only be conceived in abstraction oriented painting where I create the gesture and the line mainly linked to the expressiveness of my emotional states. My primary concern revolves around the concept of affect, which consists of transposing my emotional awareness through broken lines, quick strokes and harmonies of colors referring to my mood, through the use of music. In order to get to this stage, I select a song that matches my emotion in that moment and it will play in a loop during the creation in order to stay in the same state of mind throughout the process. The performative aspect of my own body is also inherent in shaping my process to make visible movement, speed of creation and impulsive gestures. The theme of the human body is also evoked by the presence of wavy lines that can refer to blood vessels, ovoid shapes reminiscent of these cells and by organic textures. The aspect of dualities between two plastic notions (transparency-opacity, hot-cold, light- dark, lines-masses, thinness-thickness, flat-patterned, circular- geometric shapes) is also present in my work to create what I call « special tensions ». These dual relationships complement, with balance, the visual dynamism that builds up before our eyes. Composed of a heap of masses of different colors and sizes as well as random shapes, my paintings are created mostly with streaks of speed. Working with acrylic paint is an advantage since it dries very quickly and it allows me to camouflage, juxtapose, alter or darken an old color without them mixing together. The conception of my paintings is a process of accumulation and superposition of masses or colored shapes which quickly and instinctively conceive themselves in the postmodern spirit which assumes that the work is built without a pre-established plan, according to its own advances.