Xavier Prieur

Xavier Prieur is fascinated by the material, its porosity, its roughness, he never stops mishandling his canvas. He tears, crushes, kneads, accumulates and superimposes everything that man produces and consumes, posters, pages of books, magazines, spices, fruits.... Xavier fixes the ephemeral, the perishable, tirelessly. He tears open and tears the canvases, strips the frames bare and violently to repair and reassemble them. His work leaves us with the impression of a saving healing or a wound that opens again to reveal the past. In all cases, the artist seems to tell us that nothing is definitive. In transition.

However, from repetition a soothing constant is born, a reference, the opposite of provisional, which reassures and calms worry. The more it repeats itself, the more it seems to ward off the brilliance of life.

The artist desperately tries to capture a moment whose imprint is trapped in the material on his canvas. Xavier Prieur's work resembles a fight, a timeless struggle: to seize the overflow, keep a trace, compose and recompose over time. There is something terrible in these paintings, something which reflects our powerlessness to ward off fate. Xavier negotiates. He works quickly, for a long time, pressed by what he has to say, to preserve, to exorcise, a passing time, a tragedy.