Jules Atarax (1985) - Punk Horsatic

Work by the Belgian painter Jules Atarax.

This is one of his early (and rawest) pieces: Punk Horsatic. It shows a horse in a raw, unrefined manner.

It is mainly made with oil and acrylic paints.

The artist uses an anti-pop approach and his work is exclusively managed by Éditions Danteques. He creates pieces out of pure passion.

His works are located in private collections in the United States, Switzerland, Poland, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, France and Italy.

Jules Atarax is a Belgian painter, born in 1985. Everything and Nothing predestined the artist to painting. Originating from the depths of Wallonia, he received an education that was different from what was personally assigned to him: creation and thinking. We could see in him a modern Dante, catapulted into the second millennium. After years of writing, he decided in 2019 to take up painting.

This idea came to him after he saw an abstract painting by William Turner in the Louvre, "Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Background." Deeply moved by the power of this abstraction, his choice was made: he would devote the rest of his life to painting. He then began to devote a great deal of effort to it. His painting is powerful, he sits at the crossroads of brut art, expressionism and naive art, yet he also leans toward abstraction, for despite his advanced age the artist is still at the beginning of his practice and experiments a lot.

Van Gogh said it takes a thousand canvases and ten years to become a good painter; Jules Atarax rightly realizes that he still has more work to do. But his leg is already well developed and we can recognize his style quite easily. This earned him some recognition and allowed him to sell paintings worldwide. His approach and technique place him in the middle of the Soutine-Basquiat-Condo triangle, right in the center of neo-expressionism. His painting radiates great power through the colors used, but also through the angry gesture and the few words that are used here and there. He has especially focused on the composition of so-called 'hallucinatory' portraits that reveal what lies behind the human mask.

He claims to be part of a multitude of currents and painters. Like Modigliani, he has a welcoming and very interested look at various artistic practices. What drives him the most is the honesty of his approach, which drives him when the work succeeds in releasing the artist's extra soul. It goes far beyond pure technique. He speaks more of vision, which he tries to conceptualize through his own observations and writing, while he works on what he calls vitality. His back-and-forth between writing and painting allows him to maintain a critical view of his practice.

He has painted more than a hundred canvases, mainly hallucinatory portraits, as well as an abstract series he called "Overcoming Darkness" that is still in development. His first solo exhibition, "All Crazy," was very successful, which encouraged him to further develop his approach and create other works.