Aurélie Quentin
"Art of Idleness"
Aurélie Quentin is a Reunionese Artist with Italian and Russian roots. She grew up on this tropical island nearby Madagascar. After graduating in Architecture in Paris, she soon chooses painting as a mean to express her creativity through large figurative portraits. With oil painting, Aurélie Quentin shows a rebellious and mixed youth in an urban and often tropical scenery.
A Tropical & Ambivalent Context
The kaleidoscope of tropical colors, the brutality of light as well as the delicacy coming from it nourishes her pictorial work. The young artist’s characters stand in "everyday life" sceneries, laid back’s instants, which are magnified on canvas.
A sort of incongruity is noticed through an attitude, a detail that kind of criticises the standardization of taste.
Irreverent Youth
When choosing her models, Aurélie Quentin enhances mixed race, which for her represents an obvious source of beauty and cultural richness which is evidently omnipresent in Reunion Island.
Her characters know that they are being observed, a dialogue is then engaged with the spectator.
They have in their attitude a hint of contempt and a certain irreverence that suggest a fullness of the moment, disregarding what people might will say. The nonchalance of a pose could be interpreted as provocative or enticing, but it is not so. Only the comfort of the moment counts, all due respect to the dictate of an old-fashioned and misled decency.
The Art of Idleness
The models appropriate an art of doing nothing. Idleness now taboo, while being praised by philosophers since antiquity.
Her painting, as an allegory of an assumed chill, portrays an irreverent youth claiming the simplicity of happiness.
The features of her brushes draw a "state of being" that gives back nobleness to lazing around. The time of inactivity is the one giving birth to activity, innovation, creation, and the one that allows us to really draw back from the pressure of a productivist societal dogma.
When contemplating Aurélie Quentin’s work, one is being offered an opportunity to think about a right to laziness, a right to lightness and about a certain "lost time".
A Tropical & Ambivalent Context
The kaleidoscope of tropical colors, the brutality of light as well as the delicacy coming from it nourishes her pictorial work. The young artist’s characters stand in "everyday life" sceneries, laid back’s instants, which are magnified on canvas.
A sort of incongruity is noticed through an attitude, a detail that kind of criticises the standardization of taste.
Irreverent Youth
When choosing her models, Aurélie Quentin enhances mixed race, which for her represents an obvious source of beauty and cultural richness which is evidently omnipresent in Reunion Island.
Her characters know that they are being observed, a dialogue is then engaged with the spectator.
They have in their attitude a hint of contempt and a certain irreverence that suggest a fullness of the moment, disregarding what people might will say. The nonchalance of a pose could be interpreted as provocative or enticing, but it is not so. Only the comfort of the moment counts, all due respect to the dictate of an old-fashioned and misled decency.
The Art of Idleness
The models appropriate an art of doing nothing. Idleness now taboo, while being praised by philosophers since antiquity.
Her painting, as an allegory of an assumed chill, portrays an irreverent youth claiming the simplicity of happiness.
The features of her brushes draw a "state of being" that gives back nobleness to lazing around. The time of inactivity is the one giving birth to activity, innovation, creation, and the one that allows us to really draw back from the pressure of a productivist societal dogma.
When contemplating Aurélie Quentin’s work, one is being offered an opportunity to think about a right to laziness, a right to lightness and about a certain "lost time".
