Todd Bienvenu’s thick oil and acrylic paintings are expressive, resplendent and uninhibited. Emerging first from his dense figurative compositions are the power and energy of his strong colors and their spontaneous movement.
He begins by applying colors directly: abstract forms emerge, and the subjects develop naturally, excavated through the process of addition and subtraction of paint. Bienvenu never hesitates to fill his paintings with self-mockery. He takes us with him to drunken parties by the pool, stages us in our most intimate and almost shameful moment with a very thick and chromatically dense touch. He depicts beaches, alcohol, sex, tattooed rockers, urban scenes and fragments of the everyday life – his biographical universe.
Although his subjects are often burlesque, we perceive a form of underlying melancholy. Indeed, many of them are the result of a reflection that is a source of both nostalgia and solace. Embedded within the artist’s sense of humor and freewheeling paint, the paintings bear within them major and timeless existential questions.
A more profound feeling, a tragic dimension offset the apparent lightness. In Bienvenu’s recent work, the vulnerability of the body holds an important place. In this respect, subjects such as snowboard and skateboard crashes and then, by extension, bike and car accidents, echo the physical changes related to age and the fragility of a body that is no longer 18 years old.
Bienvenu speaks as much of the party as of its end. It is as if the deep solitude of being has been made visible, even within the most banal and “good-natured” day-to-day. Yet it is a question neither of sadness nor of resignation, it is the opposite. ...
