The city is Etienne Gayard’s favorite playground. He has an interest in architecture, most particularly in the architectural details that he distorts. Thereby, his artworks lean towards abstractism, and the city becomes simultaneously surreal and intriguing. We are lost in the architectural fragments and the windows’ reflections. The viewer’s gaze seems to be blocked at the surface of the painting by the games of opacity, played by the volumes, thus bringing our interest back to the pictorial surface.
Etienne Gayard achieves his pictorial works by sampling glimpses of scenery with photography. His compositions’ shapes allow us to wonder if they are not fragments of a larger entity. His colour palette, in which muted colours are prevalent, renders his work easily recognizable, in addition to his candid tones and his subtle blue and orange gradients. Etienne Gayard is detail-oriented, his surfaces are perfectly smooth and his swathes of colour are very precisely marked-off, almost giving the impression that the work is digitalized.
