Jean-Daniel Rohrer

Jean-Daniel Rohrer was born in 1960 in Tramelan, a small village in Switzerland. His father was a watchmaker by trade and a painter. His mother ran a bookstore and stationery store in the center of the village. When he was a child, the family store was obviously the place for all his discoveries. There were books and magazines, supplies for painters and drawing technicians, materials for DIY enthusiasts, toys. In addition, Jean-Daniel often accompanied his father on walks. He watched him sketch in nature and followed him with pride, savoring the privilege of visiting museums and going to openings, of entering the circle of artists that his father frequented. So, at the store, he wanted to try everything himself: Caran d'Ache pencils, Neocolor, felt-tip pens, Indian ink, gouache, watercolor, oil, all the papers. He also wanted to read everything and especially leaf through art books. The family environment, his father's workshop and the store provide an incredibly fertile ground for creativity, encouraged with love, attention and kindness. He discovers Swiss artists such as Alberto Giacometti or Paul Klee who greatly influence 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 settled in Montreal as an artistic director in an agency 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 communications for good in 2004 to devote himself entirely to painting. In 2006, the Centre des Arts de Shawinigan presented a first retrospective and Rohrer won the grand jury prize at the Symposium de Sherbrooke that same year, along with a scholarship. In 2008, he created the sculpture "L'Homme de 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 was presented in the 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 inducted into the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts (RCA) in 2017. This induction was 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.

Spotlight on the artist's work

“Jean-Daniel Rohrer’s work is like a memory aid. It is never fixed in a specific temporality. Rohrer plays instead on the ambiguity of memory, and of history, that is, our collective memory. He gradually creates a surface potentially loaded with meaning. His recent paintings evoke the history of Europe and Native American traditions; they collectivize them in a way that consists of treating the painted surface as a field to which we can attribute different meanings. The surface of the canvas is a field that has 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 in which data – visual and verbal – are now brought together.”