Thomas Auriol

In his earlier abstract paintings, Thomas Auriol invented hybrid forms based on small, improvised drawings. Smooth objects, isolated spots floating in lyrical uncertainty. The artist cuts up and treats images superficially to produce a form of dizzying painting. His compositions concentrate space filters, materials and phenomena in one single. Like a video editor, he pays particular attention to the way these motley elements transition into one another. Pastries, aliens, gardens, a shoe or a cockpit are all featured in his more recent paintings. A disconcerting image gradually appears on the canvas, like a fade in a video. This analogy between his painterly approach and video is no coincidence: the artist spent several years travelling the world filming kitesurfers. The painter airbrushes thin layers of tinted greys, pastel gradations and strange tertiary colours onto the canvas. The entire surface of the canvas seems organic. Each canvas establishes a kind of specific, unique and complex relationship to abstraction and depiction. His paintings are a demonstration of the blinding quality of images. They simultaneously soothe and excite us, providing us with a very specific form of respite from today’s paralysing assault of screens.
Thomas Auriol graduated from the ESAM Caen-Cherbourg in 2014. He lives and works in Saint-Quay-Portrieux.
He has had solo exhibitions in France and Spain, and has also taken part in several group shows, such as Novembre à Vitry and Jeune Création, and others in Switzerland in Romania. He was an artist-in-residence at the Domaine de Kerguéhennec in 2018. As a recipient of the Yishu8 Award, he will soon join a residency programme in Beijing. Thomas Auriol is currently travelling on his sailing boat and is currently stopping over in the South of Spain on his way to Ibiza.