Claude André Thibaud presents us with multiple elements

By Caroline Canault.

The idea of verisimilitude and proportion are not at the heart of this artist’s subject matter. In a constant movement, on canvas, using acrylic, pastels, and sometimes help with collage, the energy of his actions hangs suspended, at the edge of evanescence.

It is crossed with violent emotions, like a subterranean fire. They surge forth in an eruption of sheer tonality. The explosion of something too full, something impossible to contain, expressed through twists and distortion.

The bodies depicted, broken up, dismembered even torn apart, are sometimes hardly even human. Yet beyond their convulsive anatomy, skeletons, organs and viscera emerge.

There, screaming flesh gives way to white and ghostly figures. The reference points of pictorial requirements are blown apart, individuality is depersonalized. Silhouettes become presences, kindred spirits stripped of identity or gender, perception stands out and takes on its own autonomy.

Creative and destructive desires come together. Claude André Thibaud gives us a glimpse of multiplicity. With a will to remain as close as possible to the original surge, he increases suggestive power. His is a process of free interpretation of the distinct realities bodies possess as a place for metamorphosis between the inanimate and the animate, the living and the dead.