Louis Royer
Constantly running through my mind, Henri Matisse’s artwork has sharpen my singular vision of pattern and colors. That pictural desire crashed into my discovery of aboriginal art, which maintains intimate links with the tattoos and scarifications from Pacific, practices which are dear to me. I undertake to weave a path between Matisse and Oceanian arts, a path where paints and tattoos, pictorial and dermal layers, pattern and colors mingle. Other artists, such as Pierre Bonnard, but also Paul Klee or Tal R, are strong sources of inspiration in my practice.
The challenges and upheavals that have imposed themselves on each of us in recent months have acted as a strange catalyst in my practice. After a period of dizziness at my powerlessness to master this daily life, I felt the need to explore certain fragments of buried memory. I seek to capture these creative stimuli, intertwined in a flow of childhood experiences, and confront them with regard to the person I have become. This leads to a tension between intimacy and remoteness, a real world versus a fantasy memory. This partial perception induced in my compositions seeks to meet the spectator, leaving him the possibility of finishing the narration that I started. Always in the balance of figuration and abstraction, it is a search for memories, deep memory. I paint and draw what seems to escape me, of which I have little or no tangible proof. After intense pictorial research through acrylic, I had the need to rediscover the medium of oil painting. I am fascinated by the materiality, the weight of the color obtained with oil paint.
The subjects that inhabit my compositions are deliberately constrained into the space of the canvas, they become one with. I compose by playing between the different planes of the canvas thanks to color, looking for a very thin equilibrium between reality and chaos.
In this flood of research, the motif of the bed imposed itself on me in the last few month. It reminds me of the passage from childhood to adolescence, this strange moment when one takes on relative autonomy. The ghostly vision of this bed that is too big for me, in a room that upsets the spatial landmarks of the child that I was, found a pictorial echo in my approach.
