a show curated by Lillian Davies

Opening reception Wednesday, May 6

6—9pm at Brachfeld Gallery
78 rue des Archives, Paris 3

Show running from May 7 to 17, 2009

Opening hours Tuesday—Sunday, 2—7pm

L’ Ancienne église de Colombes, 2008, oil on canvas, 187 x 250 cm

Michel Perot (born 1981, Paris) lives and works in Paris. A 2008 graduate of the L’École
Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Perot received the “Félicitations du jury,”
and will be included in the forthcoming exhibition of 2008 “Félicités” at Beaux-Arts.

 

Artist’s statement

“The paintings presented here are void of the human figure as the drama is situated in the
landscape itself, shaped by traces of human occupation. These subjects, often disgraced,
or already condemned, need, for me, to be painted in their grotesque state. The large
format canvases become a means, by rendering the neglible significant, of allowing the
antiquated form of landscape painting a contemporary relevance.

Painting maintains the same impact for a fragmentary subject as photography. It’s by the
adopted process that photography, always present in the smallest details of the work,
continues to recall something seen. As underlined mainly by their toponymic titles, each
work is, if not completely naturalist, at least realistic, and preserves the quality of
photography as an objective document.

However, these landscapes are also fantasized and mnemonic. The lighting is not natural,
and the colors are sometimes entirely recomposed, in isolated areas or sometimes across
the whole painting. A certain freedom, expanded from photography, enables me to
develop an autonomous pictorial logic, one that arises from memory, as well as the
emotional resonance of melancholy.”

—Michel Perot