Selected Works: Pierre-Louis Baron

« Old forest, where are thy spirits? Where are thy creatures? Answer me! Or I howl.

I howl... The one who howls, sometimes sings, to awaken this empty forest, that one, precisely, is the spirit of the forest.  It is he who makes the doe stand up himself, the bird fly away, the walker stops himself.

« Yes! there is supernatural, provided that we make it exist, that we learn to perceive it from here below, by the earthly, the concrete…It is not a question of whether the Gods exist. They exist if we want to make them exist. Their power is in our ability to embody them, without waiting for something to manifest independently of us. »

« It was in the forest of Fontainebleau that I began my practice of painting, first by representing nature, and very quickly, the human through it », explains Beaux Arts graduate artist Pierre-Louis Baron. 

« A prostitute smoking her cig, a half-erased tag from the 90s… very mundane appearances, which become, through my painting, marvelous appearances. But without denying the earthy, vulgar, banal character of my models. I paint them bathed in a divine light, this filtered light from the forest similar to that of churches. » Pierre-Louis, whose work also exudes an ecological dimension, has described his work as a kind of mystical realism, a quest for spirituality through a re-inscription of the human in the earthly.

Pierre’s extraordinary talents are not limited to painting. Trained first alongside his fresco artist mother, he also worked in jewelry for The House of Chaumet, and currently teaches drawing at the Gustave Moreau Museum, Musée d'Orsay, the Louvre.  Pierre-Louis presents here a unique work where many aspects of his artistic approach culminate and are concentrated : the painting titled « DARK ». The painting, a very material oil on canvas, emphasizes a tension between a world where we are invited to remain, and the artifact of a nature / culture opposition that keeps us outside.