SERGE LUTENS 1 & 2 Painting

Nail colors on canvas?Yes, I do it! If I imagine a color today, I imagine a lively, contemporary color, that voices the idea of the world we live in. If I think about a modern color I think about the nail polish. Does not make sense to look for colors of our time in a paint shop. If you go in a perfume shop now and look around, you can discover it's the new temple of color. Coca Cola depicted by Andy Warhol was the POP icon in the 50's, today the POP icon is the nail polish. Nail art is fashion and trend. Nails coloring expresses a mood, a style, a look; it's the cheapest way to have a style, to make yourself unique, to get closer to a big brand. Big companies, first of all Chanel, understood the high potential of this medium and created collections of colors with limited editions and rare nail polish. The best colorists in the world work to choose next season's colors using new pigments created with aerospace technologies. Nail polishes are easy, cheerful, colorful, endless, shimmering, 3D, gel, velvety, metallic, magnetic, polarized, pearled, dense, liquid, unique. My work comes from these ideas, I create a picture of pure color using a module that follows the gesture of coloring the nails. Using nail polish means using the colors of our time. It's more than art imitating life, it's art mirroring life. The gesture is repetitive but not always exactly alike to itself, not minimalist; I use only the original brush of each nail polish, that's why every gesture has its own thickness, size, grain and unique qualities. My artworks have the nail polishes's names: Chanel, Dior, YSL, HM matched to their color codes. Every great artist has revolutionized the medium to fit the time in which he lived. Primitive man painted on the caves with ground or grass, then came tempering, tempering oil and fresco. Just think about the use of gold in the Byzantine era or the natural colors of Leonardo (which caused the aging of his paintings) or the amazing blue made with lapis lazuli of the Last Judgement by Michelangelo. For hundreds of years we went ahead only with these techniques, improving them, changing them, refining them until Picasso and other artists realized that they could use other mediums: colors that were not colors. On the canvas appeared also paper, newspapers, small objects, ground ... this was a real revolution that spoke of their time, the industrial revolution, the speed.