VERMONT – POLARIS
For his second solo exhibition at the galerie Polaris, the young artist Adrien Vermont continues to shake the way we see art. Since his early years at the art school, Vermont likes to quote his masters as well as question them. He evokes them with respect and yet brutalize them with a spontaneous cheekiness, redefining in his own way the history of human and animal representation through the different ages of painting.
If the paintings seem to be executed with a certain simplicity, this is a misleading impression. The raw silhouettes traced on the canvas and the texts going out in bubbles of the human or animal characters remind us of the primitive paintings, as well as the egyptian or gothic ones. Always with a strong sense of humor, Adrien Vermont enjoys going over art History, digest it to better questions it.
Preoccupied by time and space, Adrien Vermont uses extremely simplified signs to represent humans and animals, seeking to create his own universal vocabulary, in which he tries to bring together his two main preoccupations : the representation and the definitive line. « Definitive » because for him a drawing must never evoke « indecision ». Never mind if the line (often large brush strokes) is not perfect ; the perfection his seeks is within this absence of indecision. Reminding us that there are no lines in nature, lines are a human’s invention. Adrien Vermont wants to recreate a world by the simplified use of the line, free of any judgment. Here, nearly no use of colors, barely no shadows or perspectives, all the patterns stand at the same distance.
Narratives on the canvas stay very simple, with an absence of perspective or realism in the characters contours that remind us of the gothic aesthetic. All representation must be as flattened as possible, with no aim to reach the famous « representation or imitation of nature ». The artist, on the contrary, tends to create his own universe.
The essential for Adrien Vermont is to reconcile the lines with the gesture : « drawing is for me the right medium to lighten things of the worlds, to better understand them. » (extract from the interview with Christina Catano, Inferno Magazine, May 2015)