For his first solo exhibition at Galerie Derouillon, Julian Farade explores human emotions through dense and colourful compositions where figures seem to emerge from each other. Oscillating between abstraction and figuration, Julian Farade wishes to extract himself from this suffocating dichotomy to develop the possibilities offered by this zone of uncertainty and instability, the place where a figure is still a sign, a drawing a grapheme, a colour a pure emotion. In this way, he creates a vocabulary of recurring figures - a house, a crocodile, a ladder... - which he arranges in all his paintings and which disappear at first glance to allow us to read a very expressionist overall composition.

A force emerges from the gesture that animates the canvas and models a material, dense, aqueous, flowing, rough or soft made of a mixture of oil pastels, paint and sometimes coffee. Julian Farade often paints above the canvas, he needs to dominate it, to have a strong and sustained gesture, to feel the point of tension and resistance of the material under his hand. The intensity of this immediate and unique gesture is directly reflected in the pure colour. Farade moves away from the symbols and meanings culturally associated with a colour to find its primordial, physical visual effect.
He works his colours like his gesture, through a drawing that takes the place of a rehearsal in order to integrate the effects before approaching the canvas. Line and colour are inseparable in his practice: it is by adding one colour on top of another that figures are gradual- ly born from each other.

The emergence of these hybrid figures evokes the bestiary of cave art that inspired CoBrA as well as the monstrous beings of Jacqueline de Jong’s pain- tings. As if born of an original magma chaos, they require a long taming by our gaze, but also between themselves. They are sometimes embodied in other media (painting, ceramics, textiles) worked by the artist as an extension of her gesture on the canvas. Julian Farade’s rustling painting is above all made of relationships and likes to make mistakes visible, to show the vulnerability of a line that is never closed, like the echo of a gesture that would never stop.

On view from September 6th to October 1st 2022 at Galerie Derouillon, 13 R. de Turbigo, Paris