Yvan Gradis

Teller of the four seasons yvan Gradis Contemporary art painting colour life

2021

Born in Paris in 1958. Painter, writer, reciter, actor. “To sit in front of a blank canvas is to invite me to the table of the absurd and to offer me a lunch opposite this supreme companion – met by chance on my bike at the age of 17, in a place in Paris that no longer exists. A lunch served, on a tablecloth. I know their names, having sometimes seen them since the age of 14: Albert Camus, theorist of the absurd, Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Eugène Ionesco, Samuel Beckett, Dino Buzzati, Jacques Prévert, Tadeusz Kantor, and other high priests of nonsense. The absurd has therefore guided my life, like a star as difficult to face as the sun or death – isn’t that right, La Rochefoucauld? – under the risk of sinking into the quicksands of madness. My life, particularly, as a writer, a painter, a committed activist – even up to the courtroom – against the ugliness, the poverty, and the stupidity of advertising, and even as a reciter of poems who does not hesitate to confront a crowd of indifferent people, wearing a bowler hat like Erik Satie, another servant of the absurd. Viewers of my paintings sometimes ask me: “Where do you get all this from?”, some even daring to question me about my hypothetical – and nonexistent – mind-altering practices… My only mind-altering thing, precisely: the absurd, which deposits and redeposits its bric-a-brac ceaselessly in my cellar and my attic, these two areas of my brain to which I descend or ascend, lying on my couch, before tackling a new painting. In my intimate bazaar, of course, not everything is worth raising: art, especially provocative like mine, being, whatever one says, an exchange with the public, I strive to address it in the hope of dismantling in them, as in myself, a few mental barriers, which cannot be done without treating them with some care. This dialogue with the future viewer of my painting thus takes place under the sign of a censorship that would be futile to deny, much to the displeasure of my dear surrealist advocates of automatic writing… Each of my paintings, each of my vignettes, amounts to a small staging where the aim is to capture the audience’s attention and discourage them from fleeing before the end of the piece. Since every creator, verbal, pictorial, or otherwise, is supposed to have a ‘universe,’ mine excludes nothing as long as it is not boring. Once seated at my painter’s table, I often look at my previous creations that line my walls, in order to go in a direction as different as possible. Hence this impression of variety that emerges from my work over the years. Someone once told me that one “wanders” through my paintings. May I always have the imagination – my ultimate astonishment – to surprise a little more each time and dig into the madness of others with the plowshare of my plow!” Yvan Gradis, 2026