Julien Wolf

Holy Torture - Julien Wolf, 21st Century, Contemporary figurative painting

2016

Julien Wolf is a French painter born in 1981 in Strasbourg. In 2007, he graduated DNSEP from the Art section at the Arts Décoratifs in Strasbourg. His oil painting on canvas is wild and naive. It represents isolated individuals or processions of mobile and unstable characters using colors that were initially frank but lately more subtle, in half-tones. His creations, very expressive, virulent and raw are at the origin of the title of the exhibition “Raw” at the Galerie Claire Corcia. His frenetic and sensual works are nourished by the materiality of oil paint, shiny and impasto, which catches the light and recalls, in the all-over filling of the canvas, the almost abstract water lilies of Claude Monet. This firework of colors and materials asserts the very materiality of painting which cannot be shunned here, for our greatest pleasure. Also Julien Wolf flirts with abstraction by practicing oil painting all over the entire surface of the canvas, while celebrating the carnivorous and carnal figurative aspect of his characters at the limit of the ‘animality. In these bacchanalian scenes, of spells or football scrums, the most total frenzy seizes the characters and the spectator is invited to take part in this deployment of collective madness. All that’s missing is the sound of loud voices, cries or vociferations that remain to be imagined because Julien Wolf’s painting is not sound! This communicative frenzy wins the heart and brain of the spectator who would like to join these scenes of unbridled and lively jubilation.