NOIR Artist (Lucien Gilson) is a young visual artist and muralist painter from Belgium (Liege) who studied in Saint-Luc Liege. At 28, NOIR Artist creates paintings and murals on almost all supports, but always in black shades (“NOIR” means “BLACK” in French). Paintings, drawings, monumental frescoes, wall art, trompe l’oeil, decoration and urban design: his “shady” work always leaves an impression. Inspired by the advertising, baroque art, tattooing and Pop Art, NOIR Artist gracefully revisits his personal painting obsessions and his very personal vision of our consumer society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQ0LG74lFWI
By meeting NOIR Artist, you’ll soon realize the keen interest of Lucien Gilson in both yesterday and today’s art. The young painter, however, does not seek to recreate what has already been done. Instead, his pleasure is to push the limits of pictorial creation even further by re-appropriating the iconography that fascinates him. His pseudonym “NOIR” was inspired by the fact that he does not use any other pigment than black, not even grey or white. Only –but more than fifty- nuances of black, whether in acrylic paint, charcoal, black stone pencil or aerosol.
As a painter and muralist, NOIR Artist sees light as a raw material born from the very heart of his black, from the bristles of his brushes. Especially influenced by the “fatal romanticism” of Robert Longo, icon of Pop Art, famous for his monumental hyperrealistic works, the work of NOIR Artist seduces at first by its technical quality and its excellence in the art of illusion. His works make it seem as if the complex mechanism of a camera had been simply replaced by a mere human hand. And yet… Let’s have a closer look.
The NOIR Artist paintings and frescoes are dotted with infinitesimal details, making them infinitely fascinating. His way of appropriating the space allotted to him, regardless of its size, allows his works to avoid being repetitive and multiplies the points of view and interpretations.
In a 2.0 Warhol spirit, NOIR Artist seeks the image that will challenge his look in magazines, advertisements, superhero movies, comics, web, people in the news, but also in Baroque painting or Christian iconography. Each raw image is then cropped, triturated, diverted to integrate mixed-up visuals with high narrative contents. Between baroque imagery and various symbols of our consuming society, his visual association are like mirror reflections of our time. NOIR Artist’s paintings subtly tease all that targets our desires.
CONTACT@NOIR-ARTIST.COM (Belgium / Liège)