Galerie Claude Lemand

PORTRAITS OF THE-NON-EXISTENT-BIRD. - FRANCK CHARLET.
Claude Lemand.

Painter and writer, born in 1965, Franck Charlet entered the Beaux-arts in Paris in 1987 and he was appointed as a teacher in Applied arts. Since then, he has had a double activity of painting and writing. In his paint­ings, his draw­ings and his prints, he uses the expres­sionist style, "without vir­tu­osity and without man­nerism, to find myself naked and free in front of the white sup­port and to tell my world. It’s not first degree expres­sionism. ”

The many Portraits of The-Non-Existent-Bird drawn by Franck Charlet in 2006 are human-birds, men or women, with one of the attributes of birds (beak, wings, legs, feathers) but they are dis­torted, enlarged, some­times hidden. His draw­ings are in black felt, in a striking expres­sionist style, rare in the French tra­di­tion. His birds from 2006 were pure draw­ings, marked by the lines of Picasso and Matisse.

The human-birds of his night­marish vision have a funny, grotesque and humorous side. They are marginal­ized people rejected by society, thinkers trapped in their soli­tude, deformed and mon­strous bodies, sad and joy­less, without rela­tion­ships in a couple or group, with fan­tasies of power and eroti­cism; tramps, young people from the sub­urbs living at the foot of low-income housing, undoc­u­mented migrants, homo­sex­uals, "humans who are treated less than beasts", young people who seek par­adise in social net­works, arti­fi­cial par­adises or the vir­tual, to invent another world.