Théo Viardin is a French painter born in 1992 in Paris, currently working in Marseille. In his enigmatic paintings, he presents mutating figures, both human and colossal. His treatment in successive layers of oil, alternating shifting brushstrokes and ethereal glazes, reveals the oppositions inherent to his work: nourished by a dialogue with philosophy seeking to capture the forces that inform the living as well as by the echoes of French theory, his canvases cannot exist without the complexity of contrast. This tension is embodied in figures as powerful as they are vulnerable, within group scenes set in stripped down universes, with bold color oppositions between the subject and the space.

Placing himself within the genealogy of modern painters, Viardin explores painting as a means to capture raw sensation, considering its result as the synthesis of his own sensory homunculus. His sculptural manner of composing volumes thus becomes an assumed attempt to transmit direct emotion through the materiality of the body and its tactility.

His work takes root in various references from the history of representations, from the myths of antiquity to Christian church paintings. This active engagement in the genealogy of the human figure questions our relationship to the authority of cultural heritage in the production of sensation, put into tension with the autonomy of persistent forms across eras. This aspect of his practice necessarily enters into dialogue with influences drawn from science fiction and speculative imaginaries. Adopting a post humanist approach to address contemporary issues, Viardin uses the aesthetic freedom allowed by the biopunk movement to explore the extent of human morphology and the affects that traverse it.