Marcel Lourel

Born in Chartres in 1972, Marcel Lourel is a French painter, graffiti artist and novelist. He belongs to the wave of street artists who propelled this art in the 1980s.

At first glance, the artist is a newcomer to European Street art. But you can't trust appearances. Nevertheless, on closer examination, we notice that the artist is focusing on the subjectivity of burned emotions, moods as well as the expression of the agitations of a time.

For him, the contemporary man is a man of his time. However, in many ways, it is as displeasing as it is passionate about certain aspects.

However, his pictorial style of movement departs from the increased realism of the current such as hyper-realism, to revive the question of artistic subjectivity, man's emotions and states of mind.

Attracted by pictorial and street art, Marcel Lourel's journey is rooted in the contemporary work of Jean-Michel Basquiat. For him, the New York artist expels a work capable of erasing all the others in the surrounding area... Including his own.

From a certain point of view, reading Marcel Lourel's works requires us to go beyond the object to discover what lies behind it. A disembodied look at the work submitted allows us to nuance this subject. This is the same brutal and sincere emulation for the incremented.

From another point of view, born of the need to exorcise the demons of the emptiness of the time, the artist's graphic approach renews the genre of thematic painting and the effusion of artistic emotions. It is a tribute to raw art and ways of diverting conventions from the representation of an object.

The approach is intended to be dynamic, impulsive and even quasi-testamentary. It has the effect of suspending the realistic dimension of the painting while causing an emotional overload of expression in the artist - at equal distance - in the observer.

As a teenager, Marcel Lourel pursued professional studies and obtained a C.A.P., then a B.E.P. in 1990. As a young man, he is an inveterate fighter, school dropout and very unruly to a background of soul music mixed with punk rock and ska.

Before beginning his artistic career, Marcel Lourel was a university professor in psychology, dividing himself between research, teaching and writing 10 novels, including a first Prize for gay novels in 2017.

As such, he likes to say that his actions are on the same level in real life. They are based on an oscillating thought between the philosophies of Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre with regard to freedom of conscience.

For him, words are written as they are drawn.