Sous la surface, 2023

Jules Atarax   New & remarkable Artists

A Belgian artist, Jules Atarax develops a body of work at the crossroads of poetry and painting. Originally a writer, he discovered in pictorial practice an organic extension of writing: a transition from language to matter, from the intellect to sensation.

Self-taught, he has progressively oriented his work toward a demanding exploration of figure and light. Nourished by the heritage of modernity—from Van Gogh to Matisse, from Turner to Soutine—he now constructs a style of painting based on the mastery of values and the tension between shadow and clarity. His current work revolves around light as an inner energy. Through female figures depicted in profile, he explores a silent presence, an inhabited serenity, a contained joy. The deliberately reduced palette and the rigorous structure of the masses reinforce this impression of unity and concentration.

Developed within the Galerie Dantesque, his work has already found collectors in the United States, Germany, Switzerland, France, Poland, Italy, and the Netherlands. His painting does not seek a spectacular effect, but rather accuracy: a light that reveals rather than imposes.