Gu-Yen | Contemporary Artist: Artworks & Biography

Gu-Yen arrived in France in the middle of the seventies and began his professional career in the fields of photoengraving and computer graphics. Always passionate about painting, he settled in the Lyon region in 1980 to devote himself exclusively to the practice of this art. Using acrylics - which he works with knives and brushes - Gu-Yen creates large, animated, powerfully colored canvases. Inspired as much by his travels as by his Asian origins, the Laotian artist transcribes onto his medium the atmospheres that emerge from the cities and landscapes he has visited. First photographed, the scenes of life brought back are then reinterpreted by the painter in a figurative style resolutely contemporary. Built around the light and its reflections, the spaces are drawn to constitute a whole as bright as dynamic and where "the reasons arise by their fluid and confused silhouette".\nAlthough broad and agitated, the pictorial gesture of Gu-Yen is deeply impregnated of serenity. Indeed, for the artist, the act of painting can only be realized in a total letting go, implying an indispensable distancing from reality. This calm and silent state of mind, close to that of meditation, offers Gu-Yen the ideal environment for the accomplishment of his work. Attracted more to revealing the fleetingness of a movement, of an action, to seizing the accuracy of an atmosphere, than to faithfully copying his subject, the painter seeks to take the viewer into the depth of his work so that he immerses himself completely in this singular aesthetic representation of the perpetual vivacity of our world.