Paul Gufflet, born in 1990, painter, portraitist.

A talented and atypical artist, Paul Gufflet revisits the classic theme of landscape and portraiture under the prism of Deleuze and Spinoza.

After a training in art school, Paul Gufflet pursued his self-taught research in order to follow his own aspirations and plastic research while maintaining a certain distance from the art world.

Like the Japanese photographer Nobuyuki kobayashi, Paul Gufflet does not paint landscapes but beautiful portraits of Nature. An enigmatic, raw and wild Nature, that he captures by using the typical codes of the portrait, most often in a tight framing, with a strict frontality. He paints a Nature of which man is absent but which paradoxically seems so human, sensitive, even melancholic. A painting of which Nature is the subject in its own right.

Paul Gufflet is very much influenced by Spinoza's philosophy, notably by his ideas of bodies and their relationships. It stages bodies that interact, it seeks to create a point of tension, a "strong point" that is located where the spectator has to guess or distinguish several bodies (leaves, clouds, rocks,...). It is not therefore out of pure political or ecological conviction, nor by rejecting abstraction or expressionism that he paints Nature, but he chooses figuration and representation because it is for him a "doorway" to bring the spectator into his universe. But also because he likes to take up the rather stimulating challenge of expressing himself by staying close to something that is subject to the rules of nature.

"I think that the real strength of contemporary figurative painting is its borrowings from expressionist and abstract movements, so it's something I try to include in my painting as much as possible, mainly through the touch, a touch that suggests more than it shows".

Paul Gufflet is an atypical plastic artist, who shows great virtuosity and theoretical maturity, so to acquire immediately...