Thierry LOULE

BIOGRAPHY:

Thierry Loulé is a French painter of Portuguese origin. After studying visual arts in Paris, he trained at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts (School of Fine Arts) in his home town, Toulon, in 1987. His life-changing meeting with Catalonian master Blasco Mentor encouraged him to show his work for the first time. He took part in numerous events, in particular the Salon d’Automne in 2002 and 2003, where his live painting won him the prize for outstanding performance. He also showed his work at the Salon des Indépendants in 2003 and the Salon des Artistes Français in Paris in 2004. Thierry Loulé he has been permanently on show at the four Galerie Estades galleries in Paris, Lyon, Toulon and Baden-Baden (Germany) since 2004. He presented his first solo exhibition at the Artifact Gallery in New York in 2017, in partnership with the Galerie Estades.
His generously colourful paintings somewhat resemble those of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Pablo Picasso. They reflect suffering, tension and the vision of an anxious artist who absorbs the stress of the world around him. Thierry Loulé focuses strongly on portraits in order to communicate with others through his work. The eyes are very important to him. The tormented faces of his characters, exacerbated by large swathes of aggressive colour, echo his tortured landscapes. His dense, thick paint, worked with a palette knife, hides an extreme sensitivity and unveils the sensuality of his shapes and matter.
Thierry Loulé is an inhabited, extremely passionate and spontaneous artist who aims to provoke a reaction rather than seduce. His characters are metaphors for the highs and lows of life, conjuring up images of his beloved parents’ birthplace. “Portugal is a land of contrasts steeped in nostalgia and joy. It is both colourful and bloody, white and black, white like the houses of the South and dark like Fado.” He draws his inspiration from the world around him and his personal experiences and feelings. Sometimes, the title of a work comes to him first and the painting develops around it: “I often have the impression that when I give a painting a title it already exists.”