LONDON.- Galerie Artima, in partnership with Galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris | Miami | London), announces Yoann Mérienne’s first London exhibition.

The French artist questions the connection between modernity and historicity with subjects influenced by Antiquity and Renaissance. He delivers a very new and contemporary approach of a classical iconography. He confronts the ages and mixes them, leading to a timeless aesthetic, sculpting a narrative open to interpretation.

Both his technique as well as his subjects are focused around sculpture. Before the painting process is started, the industrial design graduate produces moulds of the subject in question, in order to create a deeper understanding of it’s volume. He then lights each piece in a precise manner, establishing a photographic and cinematic context within which a dialogue is played out, where links between XXI century painting techniques and traditions of sculpture are explored.

An absence of colour gives way to subtle shades of grey, which are pushed aside by intermittent halo’s of overexposed light. Mérienne generates his palette directly on the canvas during the process of painting. The texture of his marks hint at the fast and brutal momentum of his brush, a movement that traces the light, and produces a form.

As this almost blinding light draws our eye, we are invited to become intrigued by the incongruous subjects of each piece, where the object of art returns to portrait, where the allegory recovers its humanity.

Yoann Mérienne was born in Sallanche in 1987, graduated in industrial design, and currently lives and works in Lyon. He has been painting since childhood, and aged 13, he won the first prize of the Concours international de Wallonie. He is represented by galerie Olivier Waltman (Paris |Miami | Londres).