PODGORNY GALLERY

Born in 1986 in Clichy-la-Garenne, France.

Lives and works in Paris, France.

Like many painters of his generation, Julian Farade explores a territory between abstraction and figuration.The roughly drawn angular figures blend with each other but also with the surrounding environment, colliding into a dynamic color mass. Sometimes the beasts are so stylized that we can only guess their configuration by putting together a set of clues - protruding body parts visible here and there, like disproportionate limbs, sharp gaping jaws, or terrified bulging eyes. He paints and draws vigorously with crude dynamic strokes, often outlining the figures and objects with black oil pencil or paint. He seems to have found his pictorial formula by combining gestural expressionists fervor with primitive figurative language, which could recall Willem de Kooning’s « Women » and artworks by Asger Jorn or Karel Appel.

Alongside his fascination with Expressionism, Figuration Libre or Bad Painting, spiced up by his interest in Jung’s archetypal theory, CoBrA movement is a major inspiration for Julian Farade. He shares its playfulness and experimental spirit, its use of vivid colors and grotesque animal images to express by similar pictorial means a whole variety of human inner dramas. In his oeuvre, he seems to exploit the concept of human animal, wittily depicting people’s animalistic impulses and desires. The power of his images lies in their spontaneity which, in its turn, characterizes both the subject he is dealing with and his very method of doing. Indeed, Julian works quickly, minimizing the time interval between thinking and making, as if he is trying to find the shortest possible way to project emotions, to capture them instantly in their fullness and freshness. Thus, he transforms his bodily energy into noisy turbulent scenes which radiate the feeling of panic, irritation and fear.

Having a very painterly approach to drawing, Julian Farade takes turns in applying oil paints, greasy oil pastels and crayons on paper. As a result, his works appear to be a sort of hybrids between drawing and painting. He truly enjoys choosing his colors, and putting them together, so, in some sense, his work is also about color. His use of bold palette misleads us at times. Through the delicious combinations of pinks, yellows, or quite overwhelming orange hues, we see distorted bodies as dancing figurines and dramatic situations as joyful carnival processions or maybe parties. But we should look past the seductiveness of colors to get to the otherwise quite gloomy meaning which the depicted scenes seek to convey.

The exhibition at Podgorny Robinson gallery features a series of recent embroidered works. This is a new medium for him that he decided to explore when he suddenly lost his studio space and could not work with oil paints and large canvases anymore. He started making these artworks in his Parisian apartment, the only work place that he had at that moment, then continues them in New York where he moved several months ago. So the idea of ‘homemade’ associated with traditional textile practice - and in this case with embroidery -, takes a very literal sense here.

Victoria Aresheva