PHILIPPE HERARD

Posted On: févr. 1, 2023

Categories: Gallery Artist

Born in 1966, Philippe Hérard began pasting his paintings on the streets of north-east Paris in the late 2000s, even though his career as a visual artist had already been underway for some time. The public space represented a new lease of life for the painter, whose visual language is somewhere between erasure and unveiling.

The barely sketched features of his early characters (the "gugusses") have evolved into self-portraits, always endowed with symbolic attributes such as a buoy, a paddle or a bathing cap. Staged out of context, with no water in sight, Philippe Hérard's characters generate an almost Dada-like reading of the absurd. They make us smile, they make us question, in search of a balance that may be illusory, perched for example on an acrobatic stack of chairs, where stability becomes an illustrated metaphor. 

While Philippe Hérard takes a detached look at the human condition in all its states, he gives the identical title of Cent Titres to each of his works, showing us that there is no single reading of his work.

Today, Philippe Hérard is one of the most talented and active painters on the French urban scene.