by Julian Semiao

Julian Semiao is an artist-painter born in Lyon in 1996. Graduated with a license in plastic arts in Saint-Etienne then a master's degree in contemporary painting at the Parisian University Panthéon Sorbonne, he currently resides in Paris where he works and exhibits regularly.

Always not animated by art, he quickly lets himself be caught up in the color and artistic ardor of Pablo Picasso, Jean Michel Basquiat, Robert Combas, Keith Haring and even Jean Dubuffet. As much influenced by the strength of art brut as by the vitality of neo-expressionism, he draws his sources of inspiration from a pop art, spontaneous and engaged.

His insatiable need to create and paint is felt in his way of apprehending the space of the canvas, which is always completely saturated. He shows us his vision of a contemporary society always on the move. His quest for a primitive vision of painting is a way to seek access to a non-standardized, more authentic, more archetypal representation. Colors, figures and shapes follow one another to embody the mystical beauty of the world around us. In his painting Julian Semiao does not seek to copy tangible reality, he embodies it, explodes it, in order to try to draw from it a primordial identity.

Very influenced by mythology, past and contemporary, he does not choose his themes and characters at random. Each element, each individual becomes an allegory that prompts the viewer to question the reality of our society. Minotaurs, centaurs and other fantastic, mystical and / or religious figures follow one another to take us into a committed representation.

Thus her pop and incongruous universe questions in turn current issues such as the place of women, the migrant crisis, religion or the search for identity. In his compositions, he constantly questions our relationship to others and to the world, always leaving us the possibility of seeing in them the reflection of our own imagination.