Jérémy Liron

"You can never know if you should accept the tumult of the world, adopt its confusion, join in with its agitation and whims, melt into it and espouse it, or oppose it with the steady, timeless, unflinching, cold eye of someone who carries on regardless." Jérémy Liron doesn't just paint. He also writes. And he does so with brio. As he paints. Thirtysomething, originally from Marseille but now living in Lyon, a former student of Bustamante at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris, he is rooted in the urban world. The one that surrounds him. Because, as he has written, "One thing is sure: we can never avoid context; we can speak only from where we are, in space and time." Suspended time and fragmented space are precisely the directive vectors of his painting; which proceeds from silence, like a Chardin still life, with powerfully architecturalised compositions. Displayed under perspex, as though to place them at a distance, his oil paintings present a world of freeze frames; which says something about how he has been influenced by the cinema. He also says that he sees the deserted landscapes he paints as "locations for a hypothetical film", but that their fragmentation makes montage impossible, and that "all fiction vanishes". There is no nostalgia, however, only "disquiet". And this was the title of one of his exhibitions. "Why disquiet?" he says. "So as not to give in to the need for consolation."

Philippe Piguet, "Portrait", in L'Oeil, No. 651, 2012
Translated by John Doherty, 2014