Dive
19 November – 14 January 2017
The gallery is pleased to present the first European solo exhibition of Todd Bienvenu (1980, USA). This new body of work is comprised of recent paintings Bienvenu produced in his Brooklyn studio as well as works made on site during an artist residency in Galerie Sebastien Bertrand over the past month.
Emerging first from Bienvenu's dense figurative paintings are the power and energy of his strong colors and their spontaneous movement. His paintings are resplendent, expressive and uninhibited.
He depicts sex, tattooed rockers, beaches, alcohol, urban scenes and parties – Bienvenu’s autobiographical universe. He says that his subjects are the ones he knows (that he is living, has lived, has pulled from the web), what he finds interesting in daily life – whatever passes through his head.
“Humor is honesty. The real struggle for me is to get butt naked in the paintings, to be completely vulnerable. Whatever it is that is on my mind, whatever my concerns are, I don’t want to hide from.”
Though his subjects are very often burlesque, we perceive a form of underlying melancholy. Embedded within the artist's sense of humor and freewheeling paint, the paintings bear within them major and timeless existential questions.
A more profound feeling, a tragic dimension offset the apparent lightness.
Indeed, Bienvenu speaks as much of the party as of its end.
Todd Bienvenu, Camping Cosmos, 2016
It is as if the profound solitude of being has been made visible, even within his most banal and “good-natured” day-to-day. Yet it is a question neither of sadness nor of resignation; it is the opposite. Todd Bienvenu’s paintings seem to tell us that everything is vain, but that absurdity diminishes neither pleasure nor wonder – quite the contrary.
2016
Acrylic on canvas
207 × 172 cm / 81,5 × 67.7 in.