Odilon Pain French, b. 1985

BOOK A STUDIO VISIT  KEEP ME UPDATED ON NEW ARTWORKS

 

Odilon Pain is originally from l’île de la Réunion and based today in Brussels. He graduated from HISK (Higher Institute for Fine Arts) in Ghent (BE) in 2012, prior to this he obtained a master in theory and research at the University of  Panthéon-Sorbonne in Paris (2011).

 

In the series of Odilon's Annunciations with their opulent decorations and pre-renaissance landscapes, the images in his work are manifestations of the invisible. The strange feeling of knowing the images without recognising them, familiar landscapes or common objects, nestles in the floating of memory.

 

Painting for Odilon Pain, especially when inspired by Flemish landscapes, is also a contemplative practice. It does not represent reality, it fabricates it. If there are almost no characters, it is because the painter leaves it up to the viewer to project them into the represented space. The different perspectives in the Annunciations, for example, remind us that some views are not accessible.

 

He uses wax, for example, for its graphic and visual qualities, but also to signify a landscape, a figure, an idea, which he places on his painting. Thus, if the colours, forms, mediums and supports are historically and culturally significant, Odilon Pain plays with these meanings and approaches his subjects in an often circuitous manner. To this plunge into the attics of history is added the richness of a composite culture, since Odilon Pain lived in Reunion and then in Madagascar.