This painting exhibition showcases the young French artist Charles Jaulerry's Mirrors series. Painted in acrylic and enamel, these works show the human figure in its most simple elementary form, traveling between abstraction and figuration, mysterious yet recognizable. The viewer is beckoned to stand in front of the canvas and contemplate his psychic reflection. Jaulerry is concerned with human nature overwhelmed by the complexity of a contemporary world – “The Scream” cries out again.

“Edvard Munch's "Scream” is a work that I like for its theme, bright colours, boldness and naiveté, but what I like the most is the feeling of anxiety that emerges from it. I love art that communicates strong feelings. I have never seen the painting in real life, yet it is a work I often thought of while creating the Mirrors,” Charles Jaulerry explains.

Born in Bayonne, France, in 1981, Jaulerry studied visual art in New York and Paris. He has developed his own original technique, and prepares his own enamel paints himself.

In his Mirrors series, dots, stars, crosses, lines, geometric shapes and dense, solid colours are obsessively assembled to form a recurrent human silhouette arising from a web of interlaced tentacles. These silhouettes, sometimes almost indistinguishable, can suggest classical 17th century portraiture as in Mirror #1 or revisit Asian religious art as in Summer where the background evokes what could be a chaotic Tangka.

The precision and control manifest in Jaulerry’s work seems to provide a containment, a means to avoid an imminent explosion; Likewise it could be a way to mingle with nature, merge and finally dissolve into it.

Image: © Charles Jaulerry, Feast Projects