Léon Chotard was born in 1998. He lives and works in Rouen.
 
After studying business, Léon Chotard switched to the graphic arts and decided to study at the Rouen School of Art and Design in 2020.
 
His pictorial practice grew out of a meditation on finitude. He’s own, but also that of images, forms and narratives, a r...eflection that feeds his desire to emancipate painting from its temporal anchorage. From this tension emerges a fascination with the history of art, seen less as a fixed heritage than as a field for plastic experimentation. The artist designs his compositions using 3D modelling software. This digital construction phase enables him to simulate autonomous spaces, where disjointed figures and symbolic objects intertwine in a logic close to simulacra. These images, often perceived as “realistic”, are never borrowed from observable reality, but rather from fabricated or even falsified worlds.
 
Reflecting on the linguistic dimension of any narrative image, Léon Chotard likes to construct scenes that he strips of meaning, placing the viewer in a position of speculative contemplation. The result is a painting that is both familiar and irreducibly enigmatic, becoming the theatre for the narratives projected by his audience. More recently, he has also turned his attention to the reverse side of the canvas, where he wipes his brushes, leaving behind residues, gestures and traces, like the involuntary sediments of an archaeology of painting. The reverse side becomes a playground whose freedom is conditioned by and proportional to the restraint of the front. What the front holds back, the reverse agitates. The back of the canvas is transformed into a ritual space, criss-crossed by accidental signs that re-enact painting through gesture.
 
By questioning the tradition of the painted image and turning art history on its head, Léon Chotard proposes an attempt to define art through a borderline case: the pictorial tradition, perceived as a hollow image of subversive contemporary art, becomes a terrain for questioning what it still means to ‘make art’, in the spirit of Joseph Kosuth’s conceptual tautologies.