Born in 1962 in Austria, Markus Billard held his first brush in Vienna, in the studio of his grandfather Robert Libeski, an illustrious painter who was a member of the Vienna Sezession for 40 years and friend of Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Wander Bertoni and Oskar Kososchka.

After studying at the ENP in Lausanne, Switzerland, Markus Billard moved to the United States, where he continued his studies, and then to Quebec City, where he completed his studies in Art at Laval University. Since his first solo exhibition in 1998, his work has been shown regularly in Europe, the United States and Canada.

The study of body and movement characterizes his compositions, which are both disturbing and highly aesthetic. Billard's free-flowing gestures accentuate the opposition between pigment mass, line and an enigmatic cohabitation of figurative elements and abstraction, producing a surprising, energetic visual sensation. His paintings convey not only the intensity of his singular artistic experiences, but also, even more rarely, his desire to paint.

Thanks to an organic weaving of gestures and movements, ruptures and continuities, Billard's visual language takes us out of the clutches of subject matter and focuses us on an active manifestation of color and an active materiality whose qualities carry several levels of reality. The ontological dimension of the trace and the ever-surprising encounter between reality and its image are at the heart of his interest. Inevitably, his paintings compel us to reflect on the gaze and its inexhaustible formal and poetic transformations.