MT20, 2025

Brat  

Brat was born in Paris in May 1968. He lives and works in Paris.

Brat first became a movie director after working various technical jobs in the film industry. Self-taught, he has learned from various art forms, from film to painting, from photography to music, from comics to pop culture. Images, words, colors, shapes, encounters and emotions inspired his world and helped him create an "off the wall reality", acting as an observer of the never ending mutation of a World that resembles us.

In his paintings, material and color work together to release a very particular strength. The strength of the "collective subconscious"… These images that we have seen before, that we know and that we have sometimes forgotten come back to us and amaze us. It is up to us to recreate our own nostalgia, his memories and his perception of the world that surrounds him.

There is an obvious stance of observation, view point and staging in his art. His art is firmly oriented towards the public, which translates his constant astonishment at a regressive, individualistic, aggressive, and above all absurd world. Nonconformist and free from the codes of society, Brat digs in his memories as much as he enjoys surveying the present, giving a sense of derision to his pieces filed with humor, violence, parody and poetry. His work relies essentially on his constant astonishment in front of the absurd and the marvelous.

Thus, the themes that he choses play with time-spaces thanks to an aesthetic appeal and to superposition. Different shades of grey and vivid colors blend and support each other. Brat reinvents, gives a new meaning to images and breathes a new life into them to tell a different story. He mainly uses aerosol and stencil techniques, as a single precise or slimy layer, or as a thick multilayer to give depth, and everything is enhanced by the use of acrylic. Pieces are sometimes created with abundance and complexity, reflecting the unpredictable mix of his imagination and of his memories. One needs to stop and contemplate, look in the details, in search of the different layers. Other paintings, more understated and conceptual, unveil a mood, a thought and reinvent the immediateness of the “Polaroid”.

He paints on canvas, as well as metal, wood and bags… This is a way to integrate “living matter” into his work. Everything can be a support. He enjoys the imperfections of wood, where the work dedicated to creating the background already creates a universe of shapes and curves on its own. He likes the brutal strength of metal… Cut out and then nailed together, plates of aluminum are added to one another in a new frame, a second life. The result is both brutal and luminous. In each painting, the strength of the material and the thickness of the paint are united. Once on the wall, the painting made of numerous layers surprises by its depth. The way a painting is shown is thus linked to the hazards of light. Using the minimalist support of a Shopping Bag for his Vanités, he points to the nonsense of a form of consumer society, increasingly excessive.

Vanités, CrossLine or Metamorphosis, he goes from one series to the other, the same way he likes to share his intuitions, his thoughts, and to believe that images have the power to impact others in their own memories.

For him art is an impulsive flow… It is adding life to the living.