Collection: Richard-Max Tremblay Solo Exhibition

Over the past fifty years, Richard-Max Tremblay has been particularly drawn to the notion of the hidden in photographic portraiture — the idea of absence, of the true and the untrue, of what remains unseen, of the obstacles that prevent vision. His work, both in painting and photography, suggests that every reality, whether past or present, conceals another, unknown or obscured.

Tremblay often considers the portrait as a way of approaching the "archaeology of the visible." For example, portraits of the same person at the ages of 15, 35, 50, and 70 reveal an archaeology of the visible that mirrors the archaeology of memory — a notion that has consistently fascinated him. Every portrait, in his view, simultaneously conveys, conceals, and proposes a truth or a reality that belongs to a personal history, traces of which may or may not be revealed to the viewer.

Portraiture, for Tremblay, has always been rooted in the idea of a "meeting" or encounter. He has never accepted commissioned portrait work; rather, he proposes the idea of a portrait to a subject, and from there, the work begins. For him, every portrait starts with a genuine encounter.

He often reflects on a quote by Iranian filmmaker Asghar Farhadi: "We never know what past awaits us." Themes of memory and the archaeology of memory, influenced by the work of German novelist and essayist W.G. Sebald, have been recurring throughout his career. Sebald's writing, which Tremblay discovered in 2001 — the year of Sebald's death — has remained central to his reflections ever since.

Throughout his career, many authors, poets, novelists, and essayists have accompanied and inspired him, including Samuel Beckett, Georges Perec, Franz Kafka, Milan Kundera, Jorge Luis Borges, Paul Auster, and Gabriel García Márquez, along with women writers such as Marguerite Yourcenar, Simone Weil, Simone de Beauvoir, Marguerite Duras, and more contemporary voices like Denise Desautels, Cécile Ladjali, and Nicole Brossard. Tremblay notably contributed a photographic portfolio to Brossard’s Le Désert Mauve, published in 1987.

Photography and painting have always coexisted in Tremblay’s practice, each enriching the other and offering different ways of seeing, perceiving, and discovering the world around him. His approach to portraiture has always been a means of fostering complicity and genuine connection through the encounter.