Julien Calot

Olo Alaia - Julien Calot, 21st Century art, Contemporary figurative painting

2019

Julien Calot is a 39 years old French artist who lives in Paris. The works of Julien Calot reveal a rhythmic and chaotic figuration, while also providing an echo of the Australian Aboriginal Art and the Surf Culture, two sources that have inspired him. Through a series of large formats of intense monochromatic harmonies of blue, green or red, Julien Calot celebrates an energetic and colourful nature, where the exuberance of the human and animal world intermingle in hypnotic acrylic paintings. Julien Calot constellates his canvases with a plethora of figurative motives. The artist offers a vision of a coloured existence, blazing and energetic, diving into a chaotic universe of noisy cities and urban flows; a world that is resolutely contemporary. His large canvases incarnate the quest for a global vision of reality. Julien Calot attempts to capture life in its complexity, its nuances: peaceful and wild, playful and disturbing, luminous and somber. The artist delivers to us the true inhabited interior landscapes of these expressive characters and turbulences, which unfolds a lush, fertile and ominous nature. The artist exaggerates the disproportionality of the bodies and always intensifies his colours, flirting with naïve art. The game of dissolution of limits between the surface and the background, as well as the dynamism of these compositions, hypnotise the spectator. Originally from La Rochelle, and in love with surfing and the sea, Julien Calot reveals a universe that is profoundly marked by the codes of the surf culture: vibrant colours and the rock music type dynamics of the bodies and faces. He explores diverse forms of artistic creation, from writing, painting and photography through the new technological processes of editing, until the mixing of electronic music.