JULIAN FARADE: 
BEWARE OF THE BULL 

For its first exhibition, Mathilde M. Le Coz gallery presents, in Paris, the work of Julian Farade, currently in residence at Poush Manifesto. Multidisciplinary and prolific, the artist deploys on various mediums (cardboard, canvas, wool, wood ...) an animal vocabulary, a mental bestiary more or less hidden by bright colours and a free line.

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The self-taught artist, has an obsessive and devouring practice, reminiscent of the naive primitivism of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the expressive violence in the blunt colours of Georg Baselitz and the irrational spontaneity of the artists of the CoBrA group. Navigating between abstraction and figuration, he urgently evacuates moods, thoughts and memories through a confronted fauna. His chimeras are a little Greek, Aztec, Egyptian, at times sympathetic, at times disturbing. They are the protagonists of the psychological landscape of the artist, the actors of his mind’s theatre. Whether on wooden bas-reliefs, tapestries or on the overflowing pages of his notebooks, bulls, crocodiles, snakes or birds tirelessly replay their role. Often fragmented by the turbulence of an unruly hand and a collision of bright colours, Farade's bellicose bestiary is never far away: a bird's beak, a sharp jaw, the horns of a bull - their arena is the sheet of paper or the wood panel that holds them back.

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To shape and contain the flow of chimeras that agitates him, the artist works by constraint. A colour palette: a yellow background, blues or beige figures. A formal limit: exploding the figures, untying them (Curieux voisinage, 2021) or, on the contrary, curling them up (Corail series, 2021). A medium: wood which gives the bestiary an almost tridimensionality or wool which levels the figures, flattens them completely. In his latest large format series (Le taureau console, 2021), Julian Farade focuses on a few motifs. His animals gain density thanks to the work of oil pastels crushed and spread by hand. The once turbulent line is clear, it is the colour that shimmers, comes alive. The bull's coat ripples in the wind and its shadow trembles. The trace of a sunrise in the upper part of the work contextualises the action: this bull is no longer a thought - it has freed itself from the artist's mind and is playing out its own story.

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About the artist

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Born in 1986, Julian Farade spent the first years of his life in Martinique before returning to Paris at the age of six where his mother chose to settle. The artist is in residence at Poush Manifesto in Clichy and Attention au taureau ! (Mind the Bull!) is his second solo exhibition in Paris after two exhibitions at Galerie Podgorny Robinson in Saint-Paul-de-Vence in 2019 and 2021. Julian Farade has also participated in numerous group exhibitions. His work has notably been presented this year by Double Séjour in Clichy and by T&L gallery in Puglia, Italy. Julian Farade collaborated with Balenciaga for its newly unveiled Spring 22 collection and two of his works were acquired by Thalie Foundation in Belgium.

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