Solen
Born in 1979,…
…the question of creation must have impregnated the amniotic liquid Solen Floch was soaking in.
Indeed, his father is a painter and a designer, his grandfather was at once a designer, a creative printmaker and a printing professional, and his great-grand-mother was, in her time, a painter taught by Henri Goetz, as well as a photographer…As this dynasty of the image on the paternal branch encounters a dynasty of musicians on the side of his mother, is it so surprising that the boy would end up developing artistic skills?
A Parisian from 4 years old onwards, he soon grabs pencils and drumsticks to play with. Might that account for the rhythms and dances coming through his later visual artworks?
As a teenager and then a young adult eager to put his potency to work, he ends up having exceptionally expressive collective experiences of making. The most remarkable ones may be the off-the-wall concerts with NFZ – his rock/metal music band -, and a few years later, the joint venture with fellow fashion lovers to create « L Maison de Couture »…
In parallel, because one doesn’t just turn into an artist by chance, Solen Floch was busy with a personal pictorial research that produced painterly responses to his most intimate questionings. Whilst occasionally unveiling some of his paintings to the general public (cf. his solo show at the Vis à Vis gallery in October 2011), he was also waiting for his inner deamons to be sufficiently tamed to consider showcasing them. A year 2020 that proved especially fecund for him – artists are often already a bit « confined » one way or another – convinced him that the time to expose himself by showing personal pieces had finally come!
> The art of Solen FlochThe art of Solen Floch
Making art does not suddenly take place when he turns 41. If we consider the extent to which the family he comes from has been concerned with the image both as a question and a making, one could say that somehow, in a certain way, Solen Floch was already painting before birth.
And probably because he knows how precious the creative act truly is, he chose to allow his painting project to mature, only giving glimpses of it occasionally within a very close circle, or with his October 2011 exhibition at the Vis à Vis gallery (Paris 75011).
From then on, Solen Floch has been silently making a disquieting yet fertile use of the solitude granted to him by his creative studio space, where he engaged body and soul in a long-winded joyful struggle that confronted him to himself, to his inner life and his relation to the world.
As he develops the art of the visible and the invisible, he gets a taste of all its facets: thinking, doubts and exaltations, sufferings and joys, whilst entertaining a spiritual connection with both the existing and its mysterious metaphysical mirror: nothingness. « Why is there something rather than nothing? ». It is indeed a major question. And, as a first tentative approach, what are these ‘something’ and ‘nothing’?
> next…Vision of the invisible
Paradoxically, this endless questioning places him in a fragile equilibrium, whilst at the same time bringing him intense joy. For when he paints, Solen Floch experiences the material sense of approaching the real of this ‘something’ and this ‘nothing’ in almost palpable ways: he makes these dimensions available to the eye and the mind.
Since art has always been the medium par excellence to approach the invisible, but also because he feels he has found a singular maturity in his relation to himself and to the world, Solen Floch has decided to present this shaping of solitude, so as to begin to share what it holds of joys and mysteries. He is finally delivering his own vision of the invisible.
From the presence-absence of traces left by hands on the prehistoric cave walls to the so-called ‘metaphysical’ painting of an artist like Giorgio de Chirico, or even Anselm Kiefer’s impossible quest, is there a more beautiful human endeavour than those tracings that makes the invisible visible?
What is it exactly that Solen Floch is offering to our gaze with his creative gesture? He certainly inscribes himself within the sort of painting tradition that questions the existing as such, thus situating his artwork way beyond the eye-candy quality of purely decorative pieces. In his own way, he produces a sort of metaphysics of the debris, of scraps and rags. He thus offers the hypnotic uncanny side of being in the world, whilst revealing facets of its (rather tiny) full and (often immense) empty spaces. Emptiness and its various configurations taking here its real importance as a formal translation of the nothing…
> next…Intriguing voids
Yet Solen’s message is not a desperate one. There is joy in the debris, the remainder, the perishable. For as long as one is alive, it is always possible to play phoenix, i.e. to perish and then to come alive again out of nothing!
How does Solen Floch give a visible shape to the invisible? By covering and re-covering the canvas so as to discover a new world made of intriguing voids and distant relationships, of palimpsest-traces and vague memories, debris of singular joys, shreds of material and immaterial life, and reminiscences of various things… This parallel world is staged in multidimensional cosmic spaces, with either dancing or suspended energies holding or releasing silent resonances…the sense of life questioned by life itself.
In other words, Solen gives a real account of life whilst inviting the viewer to catch a glimpse of the heavily beautiful mystery of existence. And the coherence of his entire body of work which is increasingly affirming itself promises to unravel into a rich pictorial scene, for our great pleasure. To bear such a strong graphic identity from the start is unusual, and deserves at least the establishment of a talent.
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