Julian Farade

Myriam Chair is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition of the artist Julian Farade with the gallery. Cache-cache (Hide and Seek) presents a group of paintings and ceramics, created between 2021 and 2022.


A bird can hide another one. But it can also hide a horse, a house, a bull. Julian Farade’s works rustle with signs. The composition of a painting is never set in advance; it always depends on the environment. As in a forest where the place of a tree depends on the place of its neighbour, which may or may not allow it light, the patterns complement each other and are arranged in a living, organic way. For example, there is an animal fight in Devant vos yeux (In Front of Your Eyes), that is immediately recognisable by the teeth of the crocodiles. These chalked lines of teeth also transcribe a heartbeat. This undulation of the lines, sometimes isolated, translates a moment of fear or courage as an emotional marker.

Everything comes into play in Julian Farade’s work. When he enters the studio, the artist puts himself in a state of availability and then on wood, on the sheet, anything can happen; everything is always open.
The superposing is a way of encouraging the comings and goings in the painting. There is no single emotion, no single moment, but a circulation between moments and emotions, as Humeur clearly indicates. This lability can be found in other works such as Un soir de juin (A June Evening), Une histoire à raconter (A Story to tell).

The artist never tries to define what he gathers on the floor of his studio. He sets a trap, a frame, and sees what passes through it; the story is outside of him and he only liberates, and more and more, the colour. At first, Julian Farade favoured two-colour printing to develop his symbolic vocabulary. We also find it in isolation in his red clay sculptures, totems, where the relationship to the archetypes dear to Jung is also the most visible. The house, the bird, the horse are bearers of meaning that cross different cultures and make it possible to mark oppositions between inside and outside, movement and stability, dream and reality. All of this is now displayed in depth in a variety of bold colours.

Julian Farade sometimes faces the risk of overload. How else can we express to manifest life, which is only change, metamorphosis and even combat? His free forms can change their meaning according to their association, and a bird may no longer be able to fly away depending on whether or not it is attached to a house. The drawing is not closed and the lines respond to a form of animism, drawing a world of ebb and flow, of passages. In the manner of Jean Dubuffet’s last paintings, the Data series, Julian Farade’s paintings on a black background can be seen as «ardent celebrations». The colours and even the white vibrate in Nuit Musicale, Duel à la Lune or La Source d’eau; the signs that translate above all the gesture lose their legibility, as if the artist were going too fast. There remains a form of urgency once the night has fallen and the paint has come out: the eye must find the hand.

                                                          Henri Guette