Arthur Lemonier, La Petite Morsure : Ketabi Bourdet - 22, passage Dauphine, 75006 Paris

In Arthur Lemonier’s works, one leitmotif persists: resisting the discomfort of confusion. Through his expressive paintings, he explores the contrasting essence of human emotion, maintaining a visual ambiguity—a pervasive versatility that necessarily leads each viewer to determine their own response. “Opposites seem to unite!” Lemonier states. The artist sees confusion not as an obstacle, but as a creative opportunity. He uses it to destabilise perceptions and open up inner dialogues. In his paintings, forms and colours merge, overlap, and distort, creating a visual dynamic that awakens both an emotional and intellectual response.

By refusing to provide simple answers or clear representations, Lemonier invites the viewer to confront their own discomforts and preconceptions. His works become a mirror of our own inner ambivalence, confronting us with fundamental questions about our understanding of identity, gender, and belonging. This approach invites each person to embrace the complexity inherent to human experience.

The paintings in La Petite Morsure tell of implosion, the instant in which ecstasy and pain converge. On faces resembling shattered mirrors, sensations crystallise. They emerge fleetingly, like flashes disrupting a stormy sky, disturbing the quiet inertia of the features.

The artist seeks to delve into uncertainty. To expose internal tremors, resist concealment, and make forgotten emotions dance beneath the storm. Through the use of a colourful palette, he emphasises the dissonance between the expressiveness of the face and the confusion it inspires. Its twisting and suppleness, its opacity and nakedness, its noise and silence. He seeks to test the skins, bathed in faded light and organic fluids, to reveal their tensions and retentions.

The paintings unfold like the stained-glass windows of a cathedral; the figures moan, respond to one another, chant their wounds or their intoxications, and unsettle.

The artist seeks to evoke the bewildering nature of exaltation, to foreground the plurality of feelings experienced alone, in the body, in the flesh, in pleasure or in death. A fascination with coldness, compassion, or disgust. Truth bursts forth on the faces, unsettling and primitive. The skins are waxen, slick with sweat, the mouths wide open as if attempting to soothe the inner fire.

These mirror-faces shatter like wounds, immodest and strange, open to anyone who wishes to enter them. They are enclosed within the canvases, in extreme close-up, forcing us to confront them without concession and, perhaps, to become one with them. Arthur Lemonier seeks to awaken instinct. The impulse of that which attracts and repels, and above all, the dense mist between the two

Raw, elusive, and feverish, the faces look back as well. They bite, without wound and without sound.

Eva Martory

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