Cidade de deus / City of God Painting

"My Work is essentially autobiographical. I work from the people that i care about, in spaces that i live in." Florent Espana "The work of Florent Espana has always been oriented towards the human being. For him, it is necessary to represent his environment: traumatic, dense and sometimes, apocalyptic. Dencity (Favelas) is the title of his series focused on the favelas and slums of the world. This series of urban paintings almost abstract, is also a reflection focused on the future of our societies. His painting, poetic, but also politic, becomes the expression of a density which reached its climax. There is something hysterical in this endless accumulation which takes place on his canvas. Florent Espana exposes us to the heights of our society , where the gap between social classes becomes increasingly large, where the place of birth is a sign of destiny, where sometimes the only space to breathe is the sky. His thinking is intrinsically linked to the history of art, which constantly feeds his work with rich references, varied and passionate.» This introduction was written by Laurent Courau (French Critic) for an exhibition and clearly defines the lines of my work. I express in my painting my view of modern society. Poverty, overconsumption, density, failure or collapse of the capitalist system. However the hope is expressed through color, graffity, words ... Even if men are not represented, they occupied an important place in this work. This is the question of the human being I'm asking. I build my research in this way I mix the tracks of time (deterioration, rain, flows, movements ...) and the traces left by men (buildings, roads, streets, murals and graffiti). There are as many drawings as references (Basquiat, Keith Haring, Rothko, Picasso, Riopelle ...). These symbols are everywhere in my work and report my interest in art history and my situation of contemporary artist. I have deteriorated the cities in my paintings and destroyed them such as an apocalyptic vision of the world. Like the recovery of earlier civilizations by contemporary civilizations, I superimposed the structures. As in medieval paintings, where the elements are structured floor by floor, Iplay with perspective and offer different points of view in the same scene (GRAND favelas). This freedom of framing and composition, I owe it to cubisme. I play with the lines, introduce text and symbols. Visually, I fed my first paint of immaculate pure colors.