Michel Temim | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Parisian by birth, Michel trained in the practice of drawing from life models, before immigrating to Canada. During these years across the Atlantic, he rubbed shoulders closely with the Montreal artistic world, working both as an artist and an artistic adviser in an art gallery. He also opened his own workshop at the heart of Montreal, where he shared his knowledge and experience by giving drawing and painting classes. Returning to Paris in 2000, he pursued his pictorial research and his artistic practice keenly “without worrying [himself] about fashions, hoping to discover and be discovered humbly”.\n Michel’s figurative painting is resolutely oriented towards the representation of a certain social reality. A close observer of the world surrounding him, the artist is inspired as much by his personal history as by moments in the lives of his contemporaries, to create short stories strongly linked to the real.\n Produced in bright colours with oil and acrylic paints on canvas, Michel’s works re-transcribe the ordinary, both classic and shared, the daily life of members of western society. His characters, indulgently painted, evolve in traditional settings represented without any artifice or embellishment.\n Through these moments in the lives of anonymous people, with whom everyone can identify, Michel delivers us his testimony and his particular interpretation of the universality of human existence. His aim: “to research the unusual side of a common urban situation to put it on canvas, and to give it all its narrative force by using the most traditional drawing and painting techniques”.