Autoportrait, 2021

Éric Lacan  

Eric Lacan started to draw attention to himself at the end of the 2000’s with black and white wheatpastes under the nickname “monsieur Qui”. Behind his sometimes elegant, sometimes scraggy mysterious female portraits hide a subtle satire of society’s diktat around women. Graphic details like hair entangled in bramble, owers and words scratched on the canvas surface, cannot but bewitch passer-byes and imbue his work with a powerful, dark and melancholic romanticism.

Eric Lacan’s work in the studio is in keeping with his street work. To a wide range of plastic practice, he adds an incredible technicality in the eld of cut-out paper, drawing and painting. Through the minute cutting of tiny paper sheets, he creates true thickets of plants and roses like funeral wreath and gives life to deadly portraits that astonish by their sharpness. His ne play on black and white is a reference to the legacy of 15th century engravers as well as Gustave Doré. It inevitably swallows viewers in a world of obscure clarity bathed in a heavy atmosphere.

In France, the work of Eric Lacan is exclusively represented by Galerie Openspace, where he has already enjoyed two solo shows entitled Seventeen Seconds (2013) and All Monsters are Human (2014).