Julien Saudubray received his degree from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris in 2012 and has since exhibited widely in solo and group exhibitions throughout Belgium, France, Italy, England, Germany, Brazil and the United States.

Saudubray attended a number of residencies including the CAB Foundation and Boghossian Foundation, both in Brussels, and PASSAGE in Bergerac and has been the recipient of the Watch This Space biennial prize awarded by 50° nord in 2016 and the Wallonia-Brussels Federation Prize as part of the Prix Médiatine in 2020.

Saudubray’s decade-long career began with painting, but he soon ventured into other visual disciplines including installation and performance. It was only recently that he returned to his oil and brush, feeling inspired to formulate a new visual language by experimenting with alchemy and in- tuitive gestures. By releasing formal constraints and stripping painting down do its purest and most austere forms, he allows his canvases with their sweeping, undulating shapes and warm, bright colors, to come to life. “ I would like the forms to impose themselves on me...until the painting, so to speak, begins to paint itself. “

After having experimented with what he calls the mobility of painting and its multiple applications, Julien Saudubray now synthesizes his experiments in a practice he defines as mechanistic. By reducing subjectivity to a minimum through the methodical application of layers of colour on the wall or paper, he evacuates the subject from the painting to reveal its internal structure. From the reduction of the latter to an arbitrary and repetitive action, sweeping, sanding, erasing, adding, paintings emerge as catches between two times, almost resembling bad digital prints, and which perpetually replay their possibility of success. “With each brushstroke I oscillate between ecstasy and boredom, observing myself painting like an absurd machine programmed on a Beckettian formula: To miss more, to miss better.”

Saudubray’s work is rooted in a creative desire to express the automatic gesture. His abstract works - united only in style and format - typify a continued artistic investigation driven by intuition - a performative process in which the artists’ painterly form and material selection is informed.

Using a mixture of oil and turpentine, Saudubray’s oil paintings are made from the application of washes of warm and bright colours. He alternates these oil painted layers with those of gesso to achieve a gauze-like translucency. The resulting compositions of reduced and repeated shapes biomorphically vibrate in both chemistry and colour, revealing the beauty that emerges from chemical chance.

Saudubray’s practice arguably communicates human desire to attempt to hold control over universal laws, all the while celebrating the beauty that arises from relinquishing control and embracing chance.