Flo Jaouen makes the beings converse, turned towards their interiority or directed towards the others. These identities, these representations of self, are obvious characters of our consciousness and unconscious. Real characters but also statues, dolls or figurines, they challenge us frontally on what we send back. This complexity of the individual is depicted in a world, a closed eight where landmarks of time and place are blurred. Excerpts from their contexts, the characters are free of decorations and any narration that could reveal their universe. Their situations compose a fiction that upsets the codes whose plot escapes us vertiginously.
The artist paints a reality that moves, fascinates, amazes, entertains, questions and worries at the same time. The innocence of young protagonists facing the adult world leads to a cheerful humor that refers, not without malice, to the ambivalence of childhood; a focus of love and tension.
When one takes the time to look at the paintings of Flo Jaouen, little by little the atmosphere is transformed, the look passes through a new prism. Benevolent feelings fade away in favor of hostile, gushing sensations such as the empirical effects of fatigue, weariness, the stress of grown-ups facing their shameless blond heads. The artist plays naivety to arouse trouble and reveal a world of tension between people. It conjures the predictable and disturbs the expected. “I like to make the scene alive, my characters have to express an emotion. I wish to transmit in my canvases a strength that I feel in the depths of me, the energy of life.”
His works escape this form of primary realism, purely illustrative. The figuration is built on a critical language, the questioning of a humanity. “At a certain point of realism, detail, you can not invent. The reality is much richer than the imaginary.” Construction works at the same time the figure and the space. The structure of the plain background calls the position of the body and vice versa. The original framing gives the impression of volume. This spatial hierarchy includes in its space the one who looks at it.
The artist prepares his sketch on computer based on photos of his relatives or strangers. The reduced and soft palette contributes to a refined atmosphere.
