English

VENTABREN

Born Didier Drullion, is a French visual artist deeply rooted in Mediterranean culture. His work, rich in exuberant and textured expression, defies smoothness and embraces the chaotic beauty of raw, untamed matter. « Life isn’t smooth, and neither is my expression, » he confesses, summarizing his approach to art. His paintings are fertile, swollen, and textured—overflowing, crumpling, and erupting with movement. They are drenched in red, charged with anger, rebellion, and primal spirituality.

Ventabren approaches sculpture much like his painting, stimulating the material through accumulation and layering. His colors consume sand, metal, paper, and recycled objects, while black stains leave burned imprints, evoking a rain of wounds on the colorful clothes of a sorrowful queen. His canvases are marked by symbols—barbaric signs, arrows, crosses—revealing the values he holds dear.

His art is tactile, as he scratches and gouges at both figures and matter, inscribing numbers, cryptic equations, and mysterious calligraphies that divulge his reflections on the foundational civilizations of his Mediterranean culture. His works, whether structured through squares or marked by quick, darting strokes, brim with eruptive images and emotions. With a hand armed with a slender knife, he sculpts faces in groupings—masks of all kinds: white, African, Venetian, and animal masks, or those of poets, princes, and jesters.

Exploring Greco-Roman mythology, Ventabren draws inspiration from bulls and fables while finding breath in the streets of Nîmes, recalling Cervantes. His rough, ironic style echoes the languages of Velázquez, Basquiat, Pollock, and others, while weaving the complex narrative of his singular artistic voice. In his poetic universe, there is a grotesque masquerade—a carnival of colorful, noisy characters that mime life’s drama and tragedy.

Ventabren’s main character, reminiscent of Don Quixote, embodies this tragedy, sketched with minimal lines, pale and sorrowful, lost in ancient dreams. Whether he speaks through masks or myth, his art navigates between figuration and abstraction, inviting viewers to interpret and project their own stories onto his creations. His work has been exhibited in France and Spain, evoking both the history and mythology of the Mediterranean while balancing personal interpretation with a universal gaze.

Ch. Bros

Featured:

Mulhouse- Galerie Concorde

Alexandria-USA: Kyo Gallery

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