Art Madrid'24 – Julien Primard
Julien Primard
Región de París, (Francia), 1986
Originally a designer, Julien Primard is also a self-taught painter. Born in 1986 near Paris, he moved to Toulon in the South of France to study design, a city he has adopted ever since. He began painting in the early 2000s, first in the urban environment, writing graffiti on the walls of abandoned factories. In 2009, he founded the collective La Thérapicturale with graffiti artist friends, and launched his first group exhibitions and artistic projects, which led him to affirm his artistic practice. In the city of Marseille, Primard fully revealed his practice, from 2016, in two solo exhibitions at Backside gallery. Inspired by classical painting and modern architecture, Primard works in oil painting and creates compositions that advocate abandonment, taking us to unusual, often inaccessible places, building these ruins to the rank of monuments, visited by anonymous and invisible characters. His paintings are meticulously prepared with photographies and preparatory drawings. The pictures of skateboards, buildings, worn-out shoes and other condemned doors that Primard accumulates, become fragments that he assembles to tell his own stories.