32 x 45.7"
Original Artwork
2018
Biography:
Aurélie Quentin is a French Artist with Italian and Russian roots. Born in 1984, she grew up on a tropical island nearby South Africa called La Réunion. After graduating in Architecture in Paris, she soon chooses painting as a mean to express her creativity through large figurative portraits. With oil painting, Aurélie Quentin shows a rebellious and mixed youth in an urban and often tropical scenery.
A Tropical & Ambivalent Context
The kaleidoscope of tropical colors, the brutality of light as well as the delicacy coming from it nourishes her pictorial work. The young artist’s characters stand in ”everyday life” sceneries, laid back’s instants, which are magnified on canvas.
A sort of incongruity is noticed through an attitude, a detail that kind of criticizes the standardization of taste.
Irreverent Youth
When choosing her models, Aurélie Quentin leans towards multiracial, that represents for her the pinnacle of human beauty.
Her characters that know they are being watched, then engage a dialogue with the one looking at them. In their attitude lies a slight disdain, a slight irreverence, a slight inner feeling that call to mind these habits of noble families where we look up and down.
The Art of Idleness
The models appropriate an art of doing nothing. Idleness now taboo, while being praised by philosophers since antiquity.
Her painting, as an allegory of an assumed chill, portrays an irreverent youth claiming the simplicity of happiness.
The features of her brushes draw a “state of being” that gives back nobleness to lazing around. The time of inactivity is the one giving birth to activity, innovation, creation, and the one that allows us to really draw back from the pressure of a productivist societal dogma.
When contemplating Aurélie Quentin’s work, one is being offered an opportunity to think about a right to laziness, a right to lightness and about a certain « lost time ».
