Louis Granet French, 1991

Following his graduation from the School of Fine Arts in Bordeaux, Louis Granet attended the School of Comic Illustrations in the southwestern French town of Angoulême, and later, the School of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. Throughout his studies, Granet was always intrigued by the artistic potentialities of translating the fundamentals of comic illustration onto the canvas, beyond the structural restraints of a comic strip. This interest was further cemented upon Granet’s arrival in Paris, where he worked as the assistant of French artist, Stéphane Calais, leading him to pursue a professional career as a full-time artist. Granet has since staged solo and group exhibitions in Paris, New York, and Luxembourg, among others. His work is also in esteemed collections such as Fondation Hubert Neumann, Fondation d'art contemporain, Société Générale and Les Arts au mur, arthothèque de Pessac.

 

Granet begins his artistic process by spontaneously capturing the visual iconography that bombard us in our everyday life with his camera. Such tendencies bear witness to the artist’s personal trove of photographs, ranging from interesting street signs to popular caricatures found on cereal boxes. Accordingly, Granet works through this collective imagery of contemporary life and globalized visual culture to inform and drive his artistic approach and subject matter in his paintings.

 

Drawing on the lineages of modern and post-modern art movements such as Pop Art and Neo-Pop Art, Granet captures the absurdity and abstraction of our visual realities in detail. Resembling the stylization of comic illustrations, the artist goes on to create digital renderings of his paintings before working on them. By playing with scale and perception, Granet moves beyond the mere reproduction and appropriation of comic illustration to foreground our contemporary realities in a discerning manner. This includes stretching ordinary objects to be larger than life, precariously on the edge of spilling out from the canvas frame. Additionally, as though simulating the cross-section of a comic strip, he unequally splits his paintings into two. Working with acrylic, Granet’s paintings carry a visual dynamism that manifest a sense of organized chaos, with each element decisively placed and staged within the canvas to form a certain narrative about our contemporary realities.

 

Granet is known for his series of flower paintings, which see the aggregation of flowers in an overload of saturated colours proliferated across the canvas. By enmeshing flowers originating from disparate geographical regions, ranging from the islands of the Caribbean to the major cities of Italy within an individual canvas, Granet demonstrates his artistic propensity for embracing multiplicity. Such is equally matched with the diversity of colours infused into the dense mass of flowers, enriching the painting with a sense of abundance. These clusters of flowers appear to mutate organically and permeate the frame, augmenting the chaotic atmosphere of our fast-moving contemporary world, albeit through the alternative lens of nature.

 

Through his exuberant compositions, Granet plays on the appetite of the viewer for a narrative, compelling him or her to navigate the entanglements between the various elements.