Extract from The Theatre of Affinities or How to Transcend Appearances par / by Dany Quine, 2001
"…In Paul Béliveau's paintings, the play of juxtaposition is not the result of a random accumulation of images. Rather, it converges towards an idea of structure or of system, an organised assemblage of elements responding to each other and building upon each other… The artist, it should be noted, has always been fascinated by architecture, by the way machines work and by industrial structures, which he compares, in fact, to living organisms…
…Paul Béliveau's works do not represent terminal points. On the contrary, they reveal themselves to be outlines, sketches, creations which are constantly evolving…The meanings conferred on the images reproduced by the artist are therefore always relative…The artist's particular approach accentuates the phenomenological character of an aesthetics which reflects explicitly the contingent nature of existence…It is in this formal and conceptual coherence that the specificity of Paul Béliveau's work resides. His paintings, which live only through the pocesses of creation or of apprehension, invite us to transcend perceptible reality by directing our gaze towards the continuity of things, towards something that--paradoxically--seems to withstand the action of time and which could perhaps be called "humanity"."
