Michel Perot

Michel Perot | Painter

Born in 1981. Lives and works in Paris. Michel Pérot works on paintings depicting natural or urban spaces, with a clear preference for wasteland or chaos. He seeks to give relief to landscape painting, and tracks down the singularity of ordinary living spaces. On canvas, he combines documentation and lived experience. Over the past fifteen years, Michel Perot has successively used oil paint, black chalk or charcoal, roller pilot and watercolor. His interest lies in the fractal world of plants, exploring their intertwining and weaving. Black and white on one side, color on the other. Watercolor comes in like a breath of fresh air. It gives us the distance we need to re-examine black as a rich, complex color. While the rollerball focuses on the mesh of strokes, the brush plays more on notions of interval and pattern. Michel Perot can work in very large format (165 × 130 cm, which is gigantic for watercolors), and this perilous choice has led him to set himself constraints (reducing the palette to three colors and determining a few typical mixes of pigment concentration). He uses the cloisonné puddle technique, which requires him to work flat on the floor, at the cost of an intense physical investment. He paints without preparatory drawings. Anxious not to be descriptive, he looks for simple motifs conducive to fractal play. He likes to block out perspective, and is the antithesis of the organized landscape.

Stéphanie Le Follic-Hadida 
From the Idem catalog, Biennale de Châteauroux 2017