heat

Against a bloody, apocalyptic background, whose horizon is blocked by the ghost of a building, a young, emaciated, bare-chested man, his eyes wide open, faces us. A black scarf hides his face. Captured at a standstill, he seems to be pointing at the dark, jagged figure, a kind of threatening monster, which is showing its fangs on the right of the painting, its eyes bloodshot, ready to pounce.

Florian Krewer (b. 1986) draws inspiration from photographs of his relatives, taken in their urban environment, to represent these young men in large-scale paintings. But the particular attention that this artist pays to the monumentality of the figures, the colours, and the effects of matter, are reminiscent of those of his elder and friend Peter Doig. The simplification of the bodies transforms these modern-day silhouettes into universal, expressionist, strange, and disturbing figures, animated by an extraordinary energy.

If the power of painting is to embody, Florian Krewer reveals its mystery when his entire canvases become flesh and raw colours, contested with the dark night or glowing red with anger. Urban scenes, brawls, battles, in which the stalker, the accomplice, and the victim merge.