The Galerie de Buci presents Vivre dos au mur, a solo exhibition by Nathan Chantob, which brings together a selection of recent paintings and drawings. The artist continues to reflect on the human condition, situating his work within the current revival of contemporary figuration.
Nathan Chantob is among the painters reaffirming the relevance of portraiture in an era saturated with digital images. Like Jenny Saville, he highlights the materiality of the body and its irreducible character in the face of the polished image produced by the media. In the intimate proximity he establishes with his models, his approach echoes the research of artists like Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose fictional characters carry a weight of memory and silence.
Born in 1991, Nathan Chantob studied drawing in Belgium before returning to work in France. Winner of the Taylor Foundation's Alain Brugnon Prize (2021), the National Prize for Plastic Arts "Éclat International" (2013), and the Special Prize of the Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts (2011), he has built a demanding body of work renowned for its intensity. In 2023, he showcased his monumental artistry with an exhibition at the Collégiale de Chartres, dominated by a five-meter-long fresco.
The large formats he particularly favors, such as Le Seau (The Bucket) and Hommage (Homage), manifest this dramatic intensity: the faces seem both held by the canvas and projected toward the viewer, caught in a tension that reflects the restlessness of the moment.
The smaller compositions, Alternative (Alternative), Lieux communs (Common Places), and J’attends la nuit (I'm Waiting for the Night), condense this tension into more intimate formats, where even part of the depicted face becomes a space for emotional projection.
Nathan often repeats this phrase, like a mantra, almost a rumor: "The densest darkness is never far from the brightest light." This phrase transcribes the meticulous work of contrast in his paintings, but also his quest for raw authenticity.
As he undertakes a reinterpretation of iconographic motifs such as The Virgin and Child, it is above all a desire to revisit tradition with a critical eye, subverting sacred codes to create human, vulnerable, and contemporary images.
What distinguishes Nathan Chantob, within this international figurative movement, is the intertwining of his influences. Heir to Caravaggesque chiaroscuro and Expressionist tensions, he injects into his painting an energy drawn from graffiti and popular visual cultures. This hybridization allows him to produce images that escape pure tradition as well as mere contemporaneity, to create a singular visual language where the frontality of the face becomes a field of confrontation. Living with Your Back to the Wall is part of a thriving figurative scene, where artists are redefining the boundaries of painting by working with the body and portraiture. Through this exhibition, the Galerie de Buci invites us to discover a painter who confronts the viewer with the fragility and power of humanity, in an uncompromising face-to-face encounter.
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