Lyo

Born in 1973 in Meudon, Lyonel Thouvenot, alias Lyo, is a French visual artist whose unique career combines early passion, academic training and strong creative experience.

Gesture, line, and material have always accompanied him: as a child, he spent hours drawing, exploring museums, and being captivated by painting, sculpture, opera, and dance. From an early age, he became fascinated by primitive arts, particularly African masks and fetishes, which he discovered as objects of power, vibration, and narrative, bearers of a collective and spiritual memory.

His taste for the archaic dialogues with a deep admiration for the great masters of classical painting, which he constantly revisits through his own gesture.

In Paris, Lyo studied visual arts and art philosophy at the Sorbonne, staging his first exhibitions at a young age. He later delved into graphic design and became a creative director and creative producer for major international brands, honing his sense of design, powerful imagery, and visual storytelling.

Now fully back in his personal practice, Lyo creates works dominated by accumulation, saturation, and contrast. On his canvases, faces, silhouettes, and words appear and overlap in vibrant layers. Each spontaneous gesture, each trace of automatic writing, contributes to a dense, almost hypnotic visual construction.

The bright, often disruptive colors create a magnetic field where chaos finds its balance. His painting is in line with the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, the urban energy of Basquiat, the gestural poetry of Cy Twombly, and the organic materiality of Tàpies, while also claiming the ritual influence of primitive art.

Each of Lyo's paintings is a field of tension and freedom: a surface saturated with signs, scribbled words, and chromatic contrasts that express the intensity of his inner tensions. Painting becomes for him an instinctive search, an attempt to grasp the unspeakable and deliver it, vibrant, to the viewer's gaze.