Thomas AGRINIER, Christophe AVELLA-BAGUR, Hervé HEUZÉ, Hervé IC, Michael VAN DEN BESSELAAR - Les Braves (2)

Press release

Thomas Agrinier, Christophe Avella-Bagur, Hervé Heuzé, Hervé Ic, Michael Van den Besselaar
Les Braves 2 January 28 – February 29, 2012

Galerie Richard brings together five young figurative painters living in France: Thomas Agrinier, Christophe Avella-Bagur, Hervé Heuzé, Hervé Ic, Michael van den Besselaar, in an exhibition entitled “Les Braves (2)” from January 28 to February 29, 2012. This exhibition follows the exhibition “Les Braves” which brought together five young French abstract painters: Erwan Ballan, Olivier Filippi, Nicolas Guiet, Rémy Hysbergue, Laurence Papouin. These two exhibitions aim to show the quality of the current generation of several painters in France. Thomas Agrinier, Christophe Avella-Bagur, Hervé Heuzé, Hervé Ic, Michael Van den Besselaar, have this ability to represent in painting extremely personal figurative universes which force the viewer to distance himself from the visual banality of everyday life and opens up new perspectives. understanding of the contemporary world. All these figurative painters allow the possibility of erasure, disappearance or transformation of the human being to hover. Everyone wonders about the reality of the world and the game of appearances. They pose the fundamental questions of our time in the visual form of perfectly arranged works of art in their compositions and color arrangements. These five artists absorb the surrounding world by making it their own. They raise the gaze by imposing their uniqueness in a controlled aesthetic.

Thomas Agrinier, born in 1976, is freely inspired by films, photos or comics. He composes a freeze frame composed of a small number of colorful characters, often in motion, in a dreamlike environment. Thomas Agrinier shares with us his pleasure of painting by varying techniques and effects on the same canvas. Each painting suggests a story to be invented and highlights the power of a painting in the face of the deluge of the flow of images to which we are subjected.

Christophe Avella-Bagur, born in 1968, represents the human condition as a contemporary painter who is deliberately in line with the continuity of the history of painting. Christophe Avella-Bagur’s paintings are frontal, beautiful and disturbing, devoid of any artifice, any element of seduction. Since 2005 human flesh has been trying to take possession of standardized bodies and engage in the fight between the uniqueness of the person and the temptation of standardization. Christophe Avella-Bagur, whose 1994 self-portrait represented him as an armored Spanish knight, is engaged in a fight where the debasement of Art and the debasement of Man are intimately linked.

Hervé Heuzé, born in 1964, will show paintings from the “Abysses” series on display at the University of Akron Gallery. These paintings bathed in blue light plunge us into ocean or mental depths, (even economic and political for those who are not afraid of allegories). Lines suggesting fishing nets stretch in space, shapes of plants, molluscs float in weightlessness as well as light dresses… shapes of insects too, almost human appearances but which are more reminiscent of scarecrows than to disarticulated bodies. What if these paintings were only a theater of shadows, a refined game that proves to us that pleasure can reside in enchantment but also that our world is only deceptive appearances?

Hervé Ic, born in 1970, shows brand new paintings that focus on the representation of nature. He is of course recognized for his representations of human groups in transparency, which requires real virtuosity. Whether they are plants or human beings, the effects of transparency do not contradict very strong precisely depicted presences. Hervé Ic is also a painter of space and light and his twilight moons coloring the clouds have the ability to become permanently embedded in the memory of the spectators. These transparencies take up a cinematographic code that is used to visualize the gaze of a person who recreates elements that have disappeared from a scene.

Michael van den Besselaar, born in 1965, has often depicted children’s toys in the absence of human beings. They can mix with the most sophisticated weapons. His painting is very realistic in its finish. His universe is bathed in a soft light with slightly faded colors. The paintings presented deal with modernist architectures of geometric houses such as those in Palm Springs, ground floor constructions in steel, concrete and glass. Through their softness and their color palettes, these paintings plunge us into an ambiguous space-time. The current fascination with recycling the past into “vintage” in a seemingly deadly game seems to be one of the themes raised by his paintings.