Jean-Daniel Rohrer

Jean-Daniel Rohrer was born in 1960 in Tramelan, a small village in Switzerland. His father is a watchmaker by trade and a painter. His mother runs a bookstore in the center of the village. When he was a child, the family store was obviously the place of all discoveries. One finds there books and magazines, supplies for painters and technicians, material for handymen, toys. In addition, Jean-Daniel often accompanies his father on walks. He observes him when he sketches in nature and follows him with pride, savoring the privilege of visiting museums and going to art openings, of entering the circle of artists that his father frequents. At the store, he wants to try everything himself: Caran d'Ache pencils, Neocolor, felt pens, Indian ink, gouache, watercolor, oil, all papers. He also wants to read everything and especially to leaf through art books. The family environment, his father's studio and the store offer an incredibly fertile ground for creativity, encouraged with love, attention and benevolence. He discovered Swiss artists such as Alberto Giacometti and Paul Klee who greatly influenced him.

After leaving the village where he grew up, a deep passion for creativity led Jean-Daniel into the turbulent world of advertising during the 1980s. He worked in agencies in Montreux and Lausanne, with trips to Paris, New York and India. He then moved to Montreal as an agency art director and later founded his own advertising agency. At the same time, he continued to paint and presented his first solo exhibition in Canada at the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec in 1997. He left the world of communication in 2004 to devote himself entirely to painting. In 2006, the Shawinigan Arts Centre presented his first retrospective exhibition and Rohrer was awarded the Grand Jury Prize at the Sherbrooke Symposium, along with a grant. In 2008, he created the sculpture. In 2008, he created the sculpture "L'Homme et la paix", a commission from the City of Montreal offered to the City of Hiroshima in Japan, where it is now exhibited at the International Convention Center of this Japanese city. The documentary film, "Le conteur d'images - une incursion dans l'univers du peintre Jean-Daniel Rohrer" (Parallaxe Films) by director Julien Lombard is presented in official selection at the 28th edition of the International Festival of Films on Art in 2010.

In 2016, he created the mural "Mundus Novus" at the Pierre Elliott Trudeau International Airport in Montreal. Rohrer was received as a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 2017. This induction is highlighted by the publication of a monograph by Robert Bernier, a 290-page art book retracing the last 20 years of painting. Jean-Daniel also devotes his time to setting up art workshops for underprivileged children in Peru in 2013 and in Haiti since 2015. Causes that are particularly close to his heart.

Light on the artist's work

“Jean-Daniel Rohrer's work is like a memory aid. It is never fixed in a precise temporality. Rather, Rohrer plays on the ambiguity of memory, and of history, that is, our collective memory. He progressively creates a surface potentially charged with meaning. His recent paintings evoke European history and Native American traditions; they collectivize them in a way that treats the painted surface as a field to which one can attribute different meanings. The surface of the canvas is a field with its own markers: letters, stencil marks, tags, photos and text images. His work appeals to the unconscious and to a universe in which our memory is disconnected from the human, because of the way the data - visual and verbal - are now brought together."

- John K. Grande, author and art critic

"Rohrer's plastic language is part graphic world, part timeless chronicle, and part pictorial tradition, through a distinctive investigation of the treatment of material. Paint, collage, stenciled letters and numbers, a mixture of fragments of memory, signs, graphics and ideograms all come together. From this structural complexity emerges an original work of contrasting character."

- Louise-Marie Bédard, journalist and art critic

"Jean-Daniel Rohrer is like a talented actor: a sponge that absorbs what surrounds him and particularly what touches him."

- Robert Bernier, editor and art critic