Grant Wahlquist, Portland, ME
Henri Paul Broyard
Grant Wahlquist Gallery offers American painter Henri Paul Broyard’s first presentation in France at Art-o-rama 2023.
Broyard’s work examines how we perceive domestic space and investigates the history of painting and mark making both within and outside of fine art. Working from photographs (frequently collected from second hand stores, flea markets, or eBay), he crops the overall image and enlarges this vignette somewhat relative to life-size, transferring it to canvas as a line drawing. While painting Broyard makes marks in a quasi stream-of-consciousness manner, pulling from painters and paintings that he has visually logged over the years, as well as the huge variety of urban marks he encounters on a daily basis (Broyard was raised in South Central Los Angeles and now lives in New York).
Working in acrylic, spray paint, graphite, chalk, and flashe, Broyard works intuitively on multiple canvases or panels at the same time, often overpainting the same work again and again; at times he restores them, recovering marks lost under new layers. As a result, the surface of a work may reference not only the history of painting in all its forms but also its own history in the studio. Many of the artist’s paintings are thrillingly expressive and on occasion approach abstraction, and each work is the product of a carefully considered process of looking and making, an attempt to imagine new painterly possibilities for his chosen genre.
