Santa Barbara

Adrien Belgrand is a French artist born in 1982 who lives & works in Paris, France.

Through painting, which he started in 2006, Adrien Belgrand documents the present time and releases the poetry of our contemporary life. His canvases are of pure hyperrealism, which are leading us into a sublimate daily atmosphere where we become the quiet spectators: The characters' faces are turned, submerged in their thoughts or in their daily duties.
These insignificant scenes that the artist captures to the very detail of a table corner seem without mystery, however there is a dull question that emerges from the artist's glance about this contemporary banality.
The recurrent themes of the artist are the intimacy and the large spaces. His canvases are mostly autobiographies and belong to the tradition of narrative painting and the XIXth century history painting, although some elements of our era (MacBook, tablet...) remind to the spectator the temporal anchoring of the scenes.
Andrien Belgrand is also particularly interested in the United States; to it's depopulated areas and the shelving of the products in the supermarkets that he has been painting since 2013, in a more Pop Art Style.

Inspired by David Hockney, Belgrand works by series from personal pictures digitally enhanced. There is at first a work of photography composition and then it is painted and put in relief. The artist puts ahead some elements. Each of these canvases has numerous references to the history of art.