At the water Painting

The German artist Jurij Frey has developed a realist style of painting whose blocks of colour and contrasts of light nevertheless allow us to make out all of the inner complexity. Inspired by a universal subject, man and his condition, the painter and trained illustrator proceeds with touches that he applies with lively, irregular gestures, always allowing haziness, an incertitude in the contours of shapes to appear, symbolising the doubt present in each of us. Because it is indeed the modern man, who lives in the city and works, who populates Jurij Frey’s paintings. Exploring the contrast between speed, acceleration of urban life and personal, intimate searching for serenity, peace, the need for nature, light, wandering and large spaces, the artist points out the contradictions of the contemporary world. Capturing these subtle emotions through lively and hot-headed painting, Jurij Frey gives himself over to a contrasted practice between big brush strokes that are wide and almost clumsy, and nimbleness, the fleetingness of the moment celebrated in his paintings by the light. Inspired first of all by the city he lives in, he draws on the marks that history, architecture and traditions have left behind, that fight to prevail at the same time as they contain their breath to give way to Modern Times.