Pascal Foisy: the painter who chose to make people smile, and why that was a serious decision
Published July 30, 2026
Before 2020, Pascal Foisy painted family, innocence and peer support against conflict, abuse, harassment and destitution, in a realist manner. Since 2020, he paints laughing flowers, welcoming rainbows and fantastical anthropomorphic animals.
That reversal is the subject of this monograph, because a deliberate turn towards gentleness by an artist who knows how to paint hardship is a position, not an escape.
Concordia, and the prize that followed
Pascal Foisy was born in Montréal and has worked across several disciplines: mural painting, graffiti, visual art and illustration. He entered Concordia University in 2013, where he won the Concordia Golf Classic Scholarship Award, and graduated in 2017 with a bachelor of fine arts in painting and drawing. In 2018, during his second participation in the Mtl en Arts festival, he won the festival's Grand Prix.
That sequence, a scholarship on arrival and a festival prize a year after graduating, describes a painter recognised by juries early. He describes his own visual language as an eclectic amalgam, moving from abstract notion to figuration, from experimentation to affirmation, from light to darkness, which is an accurate way of saying that he refuses to settle into a single manner.
Before 2020: family, innocence, and what opposes them
In the years preceding the pandemic he made narrative works whose subjects were family, innocence and peer support, set on the same canvas against conflict, abuse, harassment, the difficulties of existence and destitution. The treatment was realist while remaining free in its visual interpretation, leaving considerable room for human realities.
Putting those two orders of experience on a single surface is a difficult compositional problem, and it is the reason the early work carries weight. A painting that shows only hardship instructs; a painting that shows tenderness and hardship at once asks the viewer to hold both, which is much closer to how a life actually feels.
2020: a deliberate turn towards gentleness
Since the beginning of the pandemic, a period that brought its share of misfortune and bad news, his pictorial language has changed. He turned to simplified imagery: fantastical anthropomorphic animals, laughing flowers, welcoming rainbows. He has not abandoned realism entirely, keeping it for certain contexts, for close friends, for commissions and for public events, but the main register is now metaphor built on imagination, play and a simpler, more naive vision.
His stated intention is to make people smile, to do good and to do himself good. That is worth taking seriously rather than filing under decoration. An artist capable of painting abuse and destitution, who chooses instead to paint a laughing flower, is making a judgement about what a wall owes the person who has to live in front of it. Baron Mag titled an interview with him with a line that fits: art is a good friend.
The wall as a public argument
That evolution has direct consequences for mural work. A mural is not chosen by the person who walks past it every morning, which places a specific responsibility on the artist. Foisy's current register, legible, warm and figurative without being childish, is well suited to schools, daycares, hospitals, community facilities and residential walls, precisely because it does not impose a difficult subject on an audience that did not ask for one.
The graffiti background remains useful here in a technical sense: control of large surfaces, colour that holds outdoors, and a composition designed to be read at a glance from the other side of the street.
Collecting Pascal Foisy
His catalogue is one of the broader ones we hold, which allows a real choice of register: the recent gentler work, and pieces closer to the earlier narrative manner. For a family home, a child's room, a waiting area or an office that would rather lift a space than impress visitors, the current work is a straightforward answer.
Each work is original, signed and delivered with a certificate of authenticity, with dimensions and price on its page. For a wall, he takes interior and exterior mural commissions, scoped and quoted by L'Original.
