Ketabi Projects presents the first exhibition by artist Julien Saudubray at its new gallery in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district.
Ketabi Projects presents the first exhibition by artist Julien Saudubray at its new gallery, located in the Saint-Germain-des-Prés district. This exhibition marks both the beginning of the collaboration between the artist and the gallery and the opening of Ketabi Projects towards other artistic scenes, in this case Belgium.
Born in 1985 and a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris, Julien Saudubray lives in Brussels, where he devotes himself to painting, following a working process that neutralises any excess of intention and allows the material to determine its own fate. Through a selection of paintings in various formats, pastel and linseed oil drawings, and small wooden sculptures, the exhibition Lazy Eye reveals the happy paradox of this approach: far from denying the sensitive and aesthetic dimension of painting, the artist’s humble, repetitive, mechanical gesture reveals its full autonomy.
In Julien Saudubray’s works, the pictorial material unfolds within a framework reduced to simple, indifferent actions, which prove capable of enabling an infinite range of reactions and nuances—the seductive power of painting that the artist fully embraces. This work follows numerous encounters with different stylistic schools—abstraction, figuration, painting/object—which he synthesises in his own way. Committed to ensuring that painting “remains a matter of painting”, Julien Saudubray now executes his works layer by layer, from left to right, using a technique made possible by diluting pigments in turpentine, which creates an effect of transparency and wateriness of great subtlety. Yet this methodical sweeping motion is reminiscent of printer nozzles, the quintessential disembodied filling tool, while the artist often reduces his palette to its three primary colours, “CMY”. The result is fields of colour, washed-out and animated from within, which contrast with an always-matt background, nevertheless worked according to the same principle of addition that he has employed since 2017.
“I oscillate with every brushstroke between ecstasy and boredom, watching myself paint like an absurd machine programmed according to a Beckettian formula: ‘Fail again, fail better.’” This adage frequently recurs in Julien Saudubray’s statements, anchoring his practice in a dialectical approach: with the distance of objectivity, he allows the painting to emerge, including from its own dead ends, those induced by the repulsion of elements or the cancellation of gestures by one another. At times, indelible traces, invasive drips, or poor adhesion of the colour could compromise the work, whose emergence always rests upon a delicate balance. Conversely, it is not uncommon to discern forms—distant figurative resurgences or pure products of chance—in these luminous trails that constitute the backbone of his canvases. Indeed, the emergence, repetition, and eventual exhaustion of a motif always operate in synergy with this degree of independence inherent to painting, which escapes the artist’s will. This is why each recurring form in Julien Saudubray’s work possesses something primitive, self-evident, rather than reasoned—at the opposite end of drawing. The eye, which gives the exhibition its title, is omnipresent here through this oval form that emerges from a barely conscious geometric abstraction. In the artist’s earlier works, it was a rudimentary, radical, monolithic arch that imposed itself upon him to the point of invading the pictorial space. Vision, from which all perspective is denied, is particularly at play in these recent works and undergoes a form of diffraction reminiscent of Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase.
The works on paper, although independent, follow a similar process. They self-generate from a minimal intervention: the artist creates a drawing in pastel, which the application of linseed oil then erases, rendering the image hazy and distant. The more the paper absorbs the grease, the more it rejects any new sketch, to the point where one might see in them works with a past, favouring a materialist memory over the intelligibility of meaning.
The sculptures, meanwhile, belong to a theoretical continuity, but also to the physical extension of the paintings, of which they are the negative or counterpoint. They originate from pieces of wood lying in the studio beneath paintings in progress and become saturated with paint in a completely random manner, before being carved by the artist. Resting on their counter-form, they thus seem to acquire their own autonomy and articulate, in three dimensions, the elements of his pictorial language.
Just as eyes traverse the canvases, these works cut through space, creating an optical effect through their exposed backs, which destabilises their status as image or object. They thus confirm the artist’s inclination—he has looked extensively at Romanesque art and Minimalist sculpture—for raw, elementary forms stripped of artifice.