Julien Saudubray - drawing#137

#drawing #137, 2021, Dry pastel and linseed oil on paper, 22,5 x 31 cm, (framed)

“In your explorations of the three primary colours, you also evoke the idea of the infinite gesture, that of brushing the surface of the paper or the wall, layer after layer of colour - like an endless repentance. Is this act which allows forms and colours to appear and disappear a decisive element in your research?”

“This relationship with colour is a consequence of my determination to erase all my previous knowledge of painting. I wanted to reduce subjectivity to a minimum and this brushing gesture necessarily came together with a restriction of chromatic choices. The gesture, which resembles that of a printing machine, led me to using the three primary colours that form the basis for the infinite field of colour variations. I wanted to function like a machine. I’ve always liked this quote by Beckett: “Fail again. Fail better.” It has been in my head for years now. The disappearance, the failure, or the paradoxical effort to create an image through its disappearance.”

(Excerpt of Q&A between Louma Salamé, director of Fondation Boghossian at Villa Empain in Brussels, and Julien Saudubray, at the occasion of Julien’s first solo exhibition in Belgium). Full interview here: https://www.waldburgerwouters.com/exhibitions/dear-tcherenkov

Julien Saudubray was born in 1985 in Paris. He currently lives and works in Brussels, Belgium. Graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2012, the artist has since exhibited in France, England, Italy and Belgium. After having experimented with what he calls the mobility of painting and its multiple applications, Julien Saudubray now synthesizes his experiments in a practice he defines as mechanistic. By reducing subjectivity to a minimum through the methodical application of layers of colour on the wall or paper, he evacuates the subject from the painting to reveal its internal structure. From the reduction of the latter to an arbitrary and repetitive action, sweeping, sanding, erasing, adding, paintings emerge as catches between two times, almost resembling bad digital prints, and which perpetually replay their possibility of success. With each brushstroke I oscillate between ecstasy and boredom, observing myself painting like an absurd machine programmed on a Beckettian formula:
"To miss more, to miss better."