Anthony Vérot

The paintings and drawings of Anthony Vérot are almost exclusively portraits. They are images of individuals reproduced in an era dominated by self-image. However, this apparent repetition is a trap set by the artist to escape our blindness, as if it was necessary to unmask a crime. Blindness of believing in the equivalence of oneself and of one's image, of believing in the transparency of people, in the harmony between interiority and the standardized spaces inhabited by our bodies. The artist first poses in front of his lens his inner circle or more distant. These are the images that will then be represented in painting and because Anthony Vérot is the complete opposite of a naïve, this passage cannot be indifferent, it acts as a revealer. Painting seizes these models as a means of investigation, it appears as one investigates. She examines the bodies through a cold and methodical analysis to reveal, under the neutrality of the features, a hidden depth, often violent and naked, sometimes brutal. The intermediary of the history of art, through reminiscences of old paintings, serves this revelation. There is no truth of the image, these works seem to tell us, but a truth of painting. And this truth is made up of silent individual presences, of a strangeness of the bodies in their almost abstract framework of life, of a silent or unfathomable intimacy. The beings who make up Anthony Vérot's paintings therefore constitute a repertoire of women and men through which our human nature is scrutinized, too human, laid out in front of us like a stolen letter.