Fabian Jean

100 pages, full colour, 8.5 x 8.5 in.

Softcover: ISBN 978-1-927054-50-5 C$34.00 2022  

Hardcover: ISBN 978-1-927054-53-6 C$40.00 2023

Montreal-based artist Fabian Jean has exhibited his work across Canada and is widely acknowledged as a master figurative painter, but his work reveals a broader more complex range. His realist and magic-realist oil paintings create unique, sometimes unsettling theatrical scenes that combine interior and exterior spaces. A sleek hound saunters across a dinner table as tiny hummingbirds hover over the scene; a rowboat seems to founder in thick green waves set against a stylized gold sky, and a handsome thoroughbred stands amid discarded books surveying a table laid with a fruit bowl. These paintings achieve a Brechtian Verfremdungseffekt that is beautiful, whimsical, and slightly threatening. His series of wave paintings serves as a metaphor for his broader oeuvre, which seems to speak of the world in constant flux and transition. 

With an essay by Paul Fenniak and foreword by Susan G. Scott and Sarah Piché, this book showcases over fifty images of Jean’s striking paintings. There is also an in-depth interview with the artist by St. Thomas University art students.

“Jean’s work… brings us into intimate contact with the textures and appearances of the world, painted in such a way that makes us recognize how far we are from things, how much we are missing – when we look with our usual restricted vision. He helps us see how close we always were to a larger world that we pass by unaware, everyday.” –Paul Fenniak