Just on the outskirts of Paris, my photographer, Fabio Rabouille, and I stand outside a corporate-looking tower, unsure if we’re in the right place. Nothing about the building suggests you’re about to enter an artist’s studio—glassy, anonymous, the kind of place where you’d expect spreadsheets, not paintings.
“Coming!!” Arthur texts, and within a minute he’s at the door. His cheerful, almost sparkling presence is a jolt against the corporate facade. He’s warm, upbeat, a little breathless from hurrying, and suddenly the building feels less eerie.
Inside, the atmosphere shifts again: low tiled ceilings, a winding staircase, the soft hum of fluorescent lights. The place carries a quiet, backrooms vibe. Not unfriendly—just strangely neutral, like a space designed for anything except art.
We follow him down a long, carpeted hallway lined with identical grey doors, each labeled with a different name. He tells us each is an artist’s studio before he stops at a door with “Arthur Lemonier” in bold text. The second he opens it, the world tilts. Canvases in saturated colors rise toward the ceiling, where the grey tiles have been removed entirely and replaced by small, colorfully painted portraits tucked between exposed metal bars—their faces peering down from above, watching us. It feels like stepping through a portal: from corporate purgatory to a colorful, self-contained universe.
Inside, surrounded by bodies that shift between agony and ecstasy, Arthur begins telling us where all of this truly started.
He starts by explaining that his creative journey began in fashion, long before painting ever entered the frame. “I was raised with my mom loving fashion—Gaultier, Mugler… those 80s houses,” he says. “Since I was three, I wanted to be a fashion designer.” An internship at Jean-Paul Gaultier gave him his first taste of the couture world he once idolized. But the dream quickly dissolved. “It was vanity, ego, persona… a shark world,” he recalls. “I didn’t want it to change me. I can be easily influenced, and I didn’t want to become that.” So he walked away, not toward painting at first, but away from an environment that threatened to shape him into someone he didn’t recognize.
Painting began slowly around 2020. No grand ambition. No plan. Just one canvas. The early figures were strange and tender. “Alien kind of vibe,” he laughs. “Always bald, always green, lying on a table with a drink.” The lineage points back to Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Journalist Sylvia von Harden: grayish skin, lilac eyes, a face that resists categorization. “I’ve always loved androgynous people,” he says. “Especially people who have these alien-like features. In the queer community, we often feel like aliens, I guess. I felt like this—I still feel like this.”
Androgyny, for him, isn’t an aesthetic device; it’s the foundation of his life. “The ambiguity came from when I was a kid. It stayed. It’s going to stay all my life,” he says. “I like when you can’t really know.”
His earliest paintings of faces occupied the threshold between pain and pleasure, the tight edge where agony mimics ecstasy and ecstasy mimics agony. “If you can’t tell if it’s pain, pleasure, agony, orgasm, an imminent threat coming right into your face, that’s the point,” he says. “People project their own minds onto it. Sometimes it’s funny. You see more about them than the painting.”
In recent years, he added a new approach with bodies: stretched limbs, weight pressing downward or lifting upward. “I’m hiding the face and hiding body parts that reveal male or female,” he explains. The bodies become anonymous, sacred, emptied of labels. Their identity is not given; it’s suspended.
This is where Arthur’s philosophy deepens. The anonymity in his work is not meant to erase but to sanctify. He tells me that some of the inspiration came from 19th-century photographs he encountered, images of people whose bodies were documented as curiosities, their faces covered, their names omitted.
“Those pictures show how distant people were from dignity,” he says. “The medical field focused only on discovery and accomplishment, not on the person. I wanted to make what I call ‘body sculpture,’ sacred bodies. Hidden faces, yes, but treated like relics—something taken as it is, or shaped with our own vision. My body is not your playground; it’s mine.”
This year, a shift occurred. His canvases began to grow larger, their subjects no longer hovering between ecstasy and agony but moving toward mourning and remembrance.
“These new faces honor the ones who came before,” he tells me, “people judged as freaks or fraud. They led the way. What they went through was tough, and I can’t imagine how solitary it must have been.” He nods to influences like David Bowie and Pete Burns, speaking about their makeup, gaze, and unapologetic presence. “This is my way of celebrating them.”
This evolution folds directly into Sick Shifts, his upcoming solo exhibition opening December 6, 2025, at Ketabi Bourdet in Paris—a culmination of his ongoing investigation into the body and all the projections, burdens, fantasies, and violences society attaches to it. In the studio, surrounded by canvases in states of transformation, the show’s title suddenly feels literal; bodies, identities, and emotional weight all shifting.
Color, too, is a place where he negotiates identity. The early green alien skin allowed him to avoid the implications of flesh. Flesh tones came with risk. “I avoided real skin for so long,” he says. “Flesh implies answers. Green doesn’t.”
As his audience grew, first through sales, then gallery representation, then a viral video of him turning around one of his canvases toward the viewer, the pressure mounted. “Numbers make me stressed,” he admits. But he’s not seduced by speculation or the art world’s hunger for consistency. “I don’t want to become a factory,” he says. “I don’t want to be collected for the wrong reasons.”
Selling work reshaped his relationship to attachment. “I keep a few that mark a shift,” he says. “But the rest… letting go makes room for new work.” It’s both emotional and practical.
For all the heaviness in his themes, Arthur himself is startlingly light, far from the brooding artist stereotype. “I don’t want to act like an artist,” he says. “I’d rather be myself—quirky, stupid sometimes, human.” He navigates openings and art-world conversations with humor and sincerity. He keeps the pretension at arm’s length.
As for the future, he’s open. Sculpture calls to him, glass or bronze, monumental or pocket-sized. “I’d love to make some of these bodies as real life sculptures,” he says, almost shyly. Prints, a website, deeper collaborations—everything is in motion.
When I leave the studio, back through the hallway of grey doors and into the corporate shell of the building, the contrast hits even harder. Inside, his space felt alive. Outside, everything is flat again. It underscores what Arthur said near the end of our conversation, almost to himself: “There’s so much beauty in letting things stay unknown.”
And truly, that’s the heart of his work: a refusal to choose, a refusal to answer, a quiet radicalism born from the belief that ambiguity is not a flaw, but a place to live.
