Hugo Ruyant

Biography

Born in 1992 in Compiègne (France). Lives and works in Fontenay-sous-Bois (France).

Hugo Ruyant painted his first picture in a chapel in Haute-Corse in 2020 during a summer residency and has since devoted himself fully to painting. His first series "Survie et délices" was presented for the first time in his solo show at Galerie Variation in April 2023, then for the Emerige Révélations Grant exhibitions in Paris, Toulon and Madrid. "Survie et délices" features paintings of grotesque monsters licking bunches of grapes. A sort of contemporary Bacchus, the " Lickers " speak of both addictive and ephemeral pleasure. Repeated from one painting to the next, these allegorical figures find the generic form of a troubled feeling, between survival and excess.

His paintings are conceived as comic-book squares, propelled to the scale of Painting. By zooming in, each image synthesizes the entire narrative into a "key character". His drawing and colors cut out characters always in motion, caught in a transitory state where emotions are fixed in matter.

The figures are taken out of context, invading our reality. They appear head-on in front of the viewer.

Hugo Ruyant conjures up grotesque characters who conceal themselves at the same time as they confront us. In societies with masks," writes Roger Caillois, "the whole question is to be masked and to frighten, or not to be masked and to be frightened. In a more complex organization, it's a matter of having to fear some and being able to frighten others, depending on the degree of initiation" *. In the same way, the figures he paints take on the masks of monsters, clowns or gods to re-enact our behavior.

For him, the canvas is a magnifying mirror of reality, an extreme condensation of life where dramas, desires, humor and contemplation are brought to incandescence.

* Roger Caillois, Les jeux et les hommes. Le masque et le vertige, Paris, Gallimard, 1967, p.203