Born in Montreal, he lived for a few years in the city of Mascouche before returning to settle in his hometown where he pursued college studies in visual arts at the Cégep du Vieux Montréal in 2013, until he devoted himself thoroughly in his personal artistic projects. Mephisto Bates then touches on a panoply of artistic disciplines to invest himself particularly in painting, sculpture, installation and music. His commitment to the artistic world invites him to participate in several group exhibitions and live painting events, while also carrying out several solo exhibitions.

The work of Mephisto Bates is greatly inspired by the Quebec Automatists movement of the 1940s which advocated an experimental approach based on intuition and non-representativeness. In the same spirit, Bates tries to abandon everything that smacks of rationality, reflection and the preconceived to leave room for intuition, freedom and spontaneity. It is in this approach that he succeeds in creating his own self-referential, singular, authentic and raw pictorial language. What he sometimes calls his “large-scale children’s drawings” testifies especially to the energetic passage of the artist, enhancing his artistic process through his gestures and his textures. His exploded universe advocates the interaction between colors and composition. His works are characterized by a palette favoring pastels and primary colors.