Etienne Gros

Born 1962 in Saint-Dié, Vosges

Diplomas Beaux Arts, Versailles and Paris

Galerie Sparts, Paris
Galerie Jennifer Norback, Chicago
Galerie Art 14, Bruges, Belgium
Galerie La Pochade, Paris
Galerie Beaux-Arts, Netherlands
Galerie St Rémy, Liège, Belgique
Galerie Sylberstein, New York
Galerie Australe, St Denis-la Réunion
Galerie Herman-Bérard, Rouen
Elan Gallery, Santa Fé, New Mexico, USA
Galerie de Tourgéville, Deauville
Presentation d'une "Monumentoile" 3x4 m, Zurich

At gallery Jas de la Rimade since 2002

Etienne Gros paints fragmentary anatomies, truncated bodies, seemingly separated from any relationship with all that is physical and physiognomy. But these bodies, their sides, their pelvises, their knees - as isolated as they may be from the bodily architecture, as if captured instantaneously in an obscure fight - concentrate and liberate mysterious forces successively.
Manipulator of matter, the artist uses the technique of marouflage, applying to each canvass a thick sheet of paper which lives and moves chemically on contact with acrylic paint.

Extract from a text by Eric Verneuil

SMOKES

It is the sooty deposit left by a flame that gives "body" to what Etienne Gros calls his "smoke drawings".
He uses the flame of a candle or a paraffin lamp to trace unpredictable, delicate soft lines of immense fragility on sheets of white paper.
The artist draws with whorles of smoke, letting himself be bewitched by the random patterns traced by the smoke. Sometimes the result is pure magic, sometimes not.