“When looking for light in the dark, do not forget to appreciate the color on the way.”
Presented for the first time Hong Kong and the for second time with A2Z Art Gallery, Julien Airault, self-taught French artist, leads us to plunge into a universe that has helped him to pass a difficult period in his life.
In his earlier exhibition in Paris “Planches de Salut”, the word “Salut” is translated from the Latin “salutem”, which meant “something in good condition, in good health, whole”. It also means “life” as opposed to “death”. Therefore, “Salut” first corresponds to what keeps the good state, the integrity of something or someone, or, indirectly, an existence of which evokes “Salvation”. This leads us to understand that a “planche de salut” is first and foremost a board that allows a shipwrecked person to survive at sea. Then, by extension, the “planche de salut” or “Salvation” becomes the way to escape disaster and stay alive.
“Salvation” is a continuation of his Paris exhibition that includes a range of new works, both small and large-scale. These artworks find the same “shipwrecked” emotion, ever present in Julien Airault’s paintings. The marriage between lights, materials and colors, which transports us into marine or aerial landscapes in which we paradoxically feel a peaceful torment. Each pictorial composition reflects a whirlwind of contradictory feelings revealing sometimes the calm and the beauty of a glow in the half-light, sometimes the aggressive force of the colors in tension.
Just like person having found their salvation in front of a painting of a Master, bathed in the darkness and the light, Julien Airault reveals the path that served him as a guide, the one that slumbers in us, to survive and reach an absolute: inner peace.