Julien Saudubray (b. 1985) French

Julien Saudubray (born in 1985 in Paris) belongs to a generation of painters questioning the very nature of their medium. A graduate of the École supérieure des Beaux-Arts d’Angers and of the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2012, he lives and works in Brussels, where for more than a decade he has developed a practice devoted to the inner mechanisms of painting.

His early works extended far beyond the canvas. Installations, performances, and site-specific interventions allowed him to explore what he calls the “mobility of painting,” namely the possibility for painting to exist in multiple forms. Gradually, this reflection led him back to the canvas, not as a return to tradition, but as a field of experimentation in which each gesture becomes the subject of the research itself.

At the heart of his practice lies a desire to minimise subjectivity as much as possible. Julien Saudubray establishes repetitive protocols in which sweeping, erasing, sanding, adding, and layering coloured surfaces produce images that seem to emerge on their own. This approach, which he sometimes describes as mechanistic, shifts attention from the represented subject towards the very conditions through which painting comes into being. Each canvas records time, material, and the physical reactions of pigments rather than a predetermined motif.

The Watching and Solitudes series mark a new stage in this research. Without abandoning abstraction, they allow organic forms, luminous vibrations, and undulating compositions to emerge, sometimes evoking a gaze, a landscape, or a presence. These images remain deliberately ambiguous, oscillating between appearance and disappearance, figuration and abstraction.

Julien Saudubray’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, notably at Anna Zorina Gallery (Los Angeles), COB Gallery (London), Waldburger Wouters (Brussels), NBB Gallery (Berlin), and Ketabi Bourdet in Paris. Winner of the Médiatine Prize awarded by the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles and the Watch This Space Award, he has also undertaken several residencies at Fondation CAB, Fondation Boghossian, and PASSAGE in Bergerac.

Galerie Ketabi Bourdet has supported his work since 2022 through several solo exhibitions, including Lazy Eye and Solitudes, contributing to bringing greater visibility to a practice that profoundly renews the concerns of contemporary painting.