in the air

This painting belongs to a series of three large panels, each of which represents, strictly in the foreground, interactions, more or less enigmatic scenes involving young men against a nocturnal background: fights, dances, pick-up scenes? Painted at life size, the bodies are captured by pure colour in flat tints, and suspended in tense movements and expressions, with an indecipherable choreographic tension.

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.