Désœuvrés Painting

Born in 1960, after a youth strewn with hardships, Christian saw a major questioning. He trained as an educator and worked in the social sector until he became director of an institute for young people in difficulty. Nothing in his career leads one to think that an artistic approach can emerge from it. Interested in art as a spectator, it was necessary to meet artists for the desire to achieve to awaken. In 2007, and in a self-taught way, he started painting and sculpture. It is a period of consequent insomnia which generates important health problems. Christian decides to make passing time his ally because the days and nights offer him plenty of it. He begins to work his artistic expression permanently. After two or three years of trial and error, it was in 2011 that the colors came out. He doesn’t really know how to use what appears to him. In this unknown terrain, expressing oneself without constraint seems obvious to him. « Just because I have to, » he said. Acrylic, oil, oil pastel, felt, earth, plaster and bronze are all materials used to draw, paint, sculpt his ailments as much as his inner words. Wood, paper, sheet metal, canvas or cardboard are among the supports he inhabits with his colors. He works with constancy, challenged by the need to evolve, to change without denying himself, accepting the dark sides as well as the happiest that populate his reflections and his feelings. He works by accumulations of shapes, shapeless, deformed, dots, colors or even writing on his paintings. What he creates may seem disunited to some. In fact, he taps into his interior, instinctively listening to what wants to come out. The perfect world is something that escapes him and that he also wants to escape. Changing styles? Looking for his own? He believes he has passed this stage and finds himself entirely in the plurality of expressive modes. His influences are multiple but the Cobra movement, Art Brut and artists like Van Gogh, Munch, Giacometti, Lam, Soutter or even Klee, Lapicque, Combas and Basquiat are essential references. When asked if what he does is art, his response is: As I find it difficult to know if what is created is art, I prefer to say this: « What I know is that what I do my artistic work with a minimum of constraints. It’s a natural path towards an agreement between what I am and what I do. I leave the different media or materials guide my hand, my heart, my thought. The snapshot and the construct overlap, confront or complement each other.