Jean-Philippe Dallaire is best known for his imaginative and animated paintings composed of unconventional and macabre figures. In his original and bold artwork, such as “Femme assise”, the real and the imaginary are intertwined in a world of form and colour. Dallaire always remained a representational painter, despite a continued interest in abstraction. The artist played a role as a precursor in the return to figure painting in Canada during the late 1960s.
Dallaire was largely a self-taught artist. He lived in Paris throughout different periods of his life, where he was exposed to the works of Pablo Picasso, Joan Miró and Salvador Dali. The reduction of form, simplification of line, and oblong shapes within the seated female figure are indicative of the artist’s practice of incorporating multiple tokens of abstract technique into his compositions. Dallaire was inspired by Italian theatre, mythological figures, surrealism, synthetic cubism and art brut. “Femme assise” exemplifies the artist’s original painterly style that loosely combines many sources of artistic inspiration and remains refreshingly unconstrained by specific movements.
During World War II, while under the German occupation in France, Dallaire was a prisoner at the St-Denis internment camp. While in prison from 1940-1944, he continued to draw and study Italian. In 1945, Dallaire returned to Canada. “Femme assise” was completed in the following year, when the artist had began a teaching position at the École des beaux-arts in Quebec City from 1946-1952.
