bio

Self-taught painter, Gwenaël Salaün was born in Quimper in 1960.

Celebrating the fertility of chaos, he paints and draws "the echo of our surroundings. I choose samples from my images selection, the residuals, the remainders from our culture across different medias to build up my background and to realise a patchwork with the brush directly onto the canvas".
The output? Backgrounds widely distempered with matt but luminous shades, transparent silhouettes, impudent faces! They run and cry, melt into each other and overlap, declaring a state of emergency for adaptation. Living is to be transformed. Salaün talks about our world without denouncing it but in enrapturing it. Too many things are going too fast ? His paintings accept this as a matter of facts, but in doing so, he invites us to tame it. Let us not be afraid.
Françoise Monnin
Artension n°43 p.36, September / November 2008