About Julien Guibreteau
My work operates with a combinatorial principle, I organize improbable encounters of “motifs", a sort of factory for potential meanings. Like visual haikus where the "sacred" meets the trivial, my series function with a humorous offset strategy. A few rules lead my art practice: -Voluntarily use of "low tech" processes. The act of making is essential for me, as an artist I am in what I make. The choice of carving, of printing, stenciling, do collage (not digitally) meet this desire to have a hands-on approach. To live the tension of shaping the Idea in the matter is a fundamental experience. This attitude is also a “political gesture” that puts me upstream the current fashion of entrepreneur-artists whom delegate the making. -Work In series and set visual formulas. Constraints are opportunities to synthesize, clarify and move towards an assumed simplicity. I exploit the potential of my series until my desire wears off. Variation, combination, recycling are means of this research for clarity and visual efficiency. -Lay out sequences. My creative thinking was formed by sequential arts like comics and cinema as well as by my encounter with museum artworks. It drew to me the need to multiply the image ... My polyptyques continue to explore the range of possibilities for the assembly, the ellipse and the construction of pictorial space. -Choose "archetypal motifs" Rembrandt, angels, King Kong, Chanel No. 5, banana skins, Buddha, 100$ bills, astronauts, etc. The subject-matters is central in my approach but is chosen capriciously. I extract figures from the common culture for their archetypal dimension, for their potential to carry along with them a set of images, meanings that the viewer activate and complete when meeting my work. Actually these subject I pick do not interest me in themselves, but for the way they “sing” and “sound” when combined. Analogical and futile, they collide and "dialogue" in the simultaneity of the image. But as Francis Bacon put it, "If we can say it, why bother to paint it?
Education:
2001- Masters of Visual Arts, École Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Nantes.
2002 - Certified art Teacher
Events:
June 2016: limited artist book edition of 16 lithographies: "So Far So Good" at Edition R.L.D.
Exhibitions:
Solo Exhibitions:
2013- "Space Oddities",
Vee Gallery Taichung, Taiwan
2011- "French connection",
Taichung, Taiwan
2010- "King Kong, Rembrandt, lipsticks, etc."
Gallery 141, Lancaster PA. USA
Group Exhibitions:
2013- "Un seul Grain de Riz",
Galerie Metanoia, Paris, France
2012- "Undo the tangible",
The Lloyd Gill Gallery, Weston-Super-Mare, UK
