Lucas Drean

Lucas Dréan: a sure feature for a baroque explosion

Lucas Dréan is a very young creator of 22 years old, already able to channel into painting an energy clean at his age, as did before him a Basquiat, a Keith Haring, a Di Rosa, or a Combas, influences perfectly claimed.

But where does this trait that seems so sure to us come from? This brush, already so assertive and which seems to come from a long practice and a great mastery? This color ratio perfectly adjusted according to the effects he wants to propose to our eye? Quite simply from an assiduous practice, totally self-taught, which comes from a long and patient training in drawing and painting, in his mother's workshop, since his earliest childhood. Lucas Dréan perfectly claims the freedom of his compositions. Like his artistic models, particularly the free figuration, he affirms his art as a "This is not a "learned" and "mentalized" approach, but rather an instinctive and meaningful "after-the-fact" one.

An unconscious painting determined by its viewers

For Lucas Dréan, this immersion in matter is totally unconscious with regard to his own aesthetic or narrative issues. He begins his paintings without a precise goal, without any objective to achieve, without any particular design, just a need to pour this overflow of energy onto a canvas. And it is in the very gesture that emerges from this almost creative "trance" that the subject gradually imposes itself, from the first characters to this apparent chaos, this saturated and baroque filling, this extraordinary gallery of faces that seem to spring towards us and solicit us in various ways. For this is precisely the heart of his practice, to precisely seek to see his creatures escape him. It is his real concern as an artist to make us react, each in his own way, by investing in a perfectly subjective way the supposed meaning of the individuals we think we can distinguish, the relationships or emotions they maintain between them and the sense of their presence in this common space. The titles, rather factual, finally give only an afterthought explanation of what the artist is obliged to observe objectively when his characters escaped from his brush finally start to balance, which marks the end of his work. Whether we are uncomfortable with such an overflow of expressions or sometimes, on the contrary, the absence of character traits, with the flood of all these faces, with their hybrid, chimeric or trans-humanist side; whether we are on the contrary joyful with these colours, the humour and the abundance of this colourful, absurd, touching and useless crowd, as in our contemporary societies. In all cases, the transition is made, and according to the artist's wishes, illustrating Marcel Duchamp's formula: it is the viewer who is the co-creator of the work.