About The Artist

Man, alone, nude. Naturally, Cyril Goury-Laffont's paintings could be qualified as representational and contemporary. Naturally, we recognize frankly a human shape in front of a neutral background. Naturally, they deal with solitude and finitude. But more still. They are gripping. Not by the cold exhibition of hopeless human flesh. Not by the boiling explosion of the split man. Line drawings and colors neither determine nor limit. The pictorial material informs the human being more than showing or creating it. Between line drawing and space opening, between this unlimited background and this unrooted, shape the human body is neither material nor symbol. Not individualized but profoundly inhabited, it is the subtle place where interiority and exteriority meet. Where the background informs the man who emanates from. Where the body is living substance: neither a secret sum of muscles imagined under the surface skin, nor lively flesh shouting an intimate fear. Man is there a ball of flesh which emerges and roams. These paintings represent neither man nor body. But the liquidity of the flesh - which inquires in a spontaneous, indefinite and unlimited movement. Human being does not take place directly in the representation of fear - even if these paintings provoke this feeling. In Cyril Goury-Laffont's paintings, human being thus appears in this unstable exchange of the feeling body and the felt body. The painting rises from the echo of the material, between intimacy and representation. The art springs from this vertiginous emergence. It is not a question of either showing or guessing man. It is a question of provoking him. Like an accident. Caroline Pochoy, on January 3rd, 2008