Julian Farade is a French artist born in Paris in 1986. He lives and works in Paris.

 

Whether he combs them, draws them, weaves them, engraves them, Julian Farade's fantastic animals are everywhere. They swarm, abound, overflow. On top of each other, against each other, they struggle, crash, disappear into the mass and reappear fragmented: a mouth with sharp fangs, the wide beak of a bird, the horns of a zebu, a paw with sharp claws. Halfway between figuration and abstraction, Julian Farade represents a chaos of shapes and colors that constantly clash without ever letting an ounce of a possible resolution appear. The artist's chimeras are simultaneously Greek, Aztec, Egyptian - they are the protagonists of his psychological landscape, the actors of the human comedy.  

 

If we find the freedom of an expeditious, spontaneous and sometimes turbulent line of the abstract expressionists (de Kooning), the caricatural simplification of his bestiary, primitive, naive and even grotesque, akin his work to the artists of free figuration (Robert Combas), Bad Painting (Basquiat), and, above all, the CoBrA group. Like Karel Appel, Asger Jorn or Corneille, Julian Farade forms, with strident colors, an elementary instinctive poetics. Like them, he is interested in popular arts and crafts, inventing an embroidery stitch that allows him to transpose his pictorial animal vocabulary into wool. To the debacle laid down in urgency of his canvases and his notebooks yields a tedious and meditative work. We speak the same language there but the embroidery levels the figures, which pushed to the paroxysm of their simplification,  become colored shapes standing out against each other - not without affinity with Matisse's cut-out papers.  

 

This mythological and familiar bestiary that the artist reproduces in an obsessive and bulimic way on all the supports that pass through his hands (drawings, paintings and embroidery, but also  engraving on wood and ceramics) appears as the pictorial transcription, the disguised objectification of his emotions. The crocodile, the bird, the snake test by a ferocious confrontation the human tensions in a true pictorial catharsis. With Casse-mémoire, Farade explores his memories in the form of teasing, a puzzle whose solution is obtained by recomposing numerical sequences or drawings by sliding squares in a frame. Here, the artist invites us to play with his memory but also with our memory - his animals that inhabit him are also ours.  

 

​