Lucio de Heusch was a French Canadian painter and printmaker whose practice explored abstraction, perception, and the relationship between space, time, and memory. Born in Sherbrooke, Québec, de Heusch studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montréal and later completed a Baccalauréat en arts plastiques at UQAM, where he would eventually return as a professor. His teachers included Albert Dumouchel and Roland Pichet, two major figures in the development of modern Québec art. Throughout his career, de Heusch created paintings, prints, and works on paper that investigate the tensions between surface and depth, framing and openness, interior and exterior space. His tableaux-boîtes and named series—such as the Série portes (1981), presented in the exhibition Portes/arches/mémoire at Galerie Graff—are emblematic of his concern with thresholds and transitions. Doors, arches, and memory served as recurring metaphors in his work, evoking questions of passage, concealment, and perception. De Heusch exhibited widely in Canada and abroad, with solo and group presentations in Montréal, Toronto, Paris, and Japan. His work is represented in major public collections, including the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, the Canada Council Art Bank, and Loto-Québec. Committed to both creation and pedagogy, de Heusch influenced generations of students and left a legacy rooted in exploration, precision, and an ongoing dialogue between abstraction and lived experience.
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