For our first participation to the Armory Show the gallery would like to present a series of new oil paintings by Paris-based artist Julien des Monstiers.
His paintings are made with ever-thwarted layers, strata so closely overlapping they cannot be differentiated. A « non-style », filled with overload, colored dissonances, and impasto that paradoxically becomes « a style ». Ill-assorted sometimes, for the viewer and perhaps even for its author, for it is filled with ambiguous sensations, feelings that go from rejection to felicity. A body of work with no concern whatsoever for seriality, a most beloved component nowadays, in the art world as it allows for an immediate identification. A painting that isn’t an open window on the world, but rather many doors that lead to the spaces where the creation matter lies.
At the time of the apogee of the Metaverse, a space in which the protagonists can evolve in an entirely virtual "other world", the artist would like to show, without criticizing, that painting has already been offering for thousands of years an out-of-this-world, complex, deregulated, autonomous space with its own signs.
While the beta version of a software program is a kind of infinite prototype, the one that comes prior to the finite and perfect meta version, then painting could be considered a meta version of the world – the place where intuitions are engaged, desires in their raw state, a surface full of bugs like an ode to doubts, possibilities, and dreams.
To echo this statement, he painted anarchical habitats: huts that are places that have truly existed. The inhabitants of these singular constructions dream of autonomy, of a world beyond the world. Through their approach, they replay the duality of map versus territory. The living world is mapped out and yet the actual territory is always full of “hideouts”.
With the support of Centre national des arts plastiques (National Centre for Visuals Arts), France
