Chase the dragon

With : Kosta Kulundzic, Axel Pahlavi, Jérôme Zonder, Larry Clark, Dado and Peter Saul. Chase the dragon : Paint as some could not stop smoking their opium pipe back in the days. Do crack heads and painters have something in common ? What is painting about these days ? Rock meets Chic and let’s see where the painter lead us in their trip while under the adrenaline of their own painting. With artists such as Dado, Peter Saul, Kosta Kulundzic, Jerôme Zonder and Axel Pahlavi, the show explores the practice of painting, the feeling induced and what it is to break the limits..

Chase the Dragon refers to the “high” you get the first time you try a drug. The drug will slowly become an obsession and will lead you into a never ending quest for that shiver you get the first time. Painting becomes a drug, the sensations it gives are so intense but at the same time hardly distrainable. Each artist inhales the world to spit it back out like one does with opium and creates works that are drug shots for him, intense.

These artists build an eccentric world; they paint their own world, but without following classic conventions. Their works shout at us, we can’t just ignore them.  Some are quite extreme like the dark and tortuous world of Jérôme Zonder, others are mystical like Axel Pahlavi’s or funnily gore as Kosta Kulundzic’s dragons. From the frontal impact of Larry Clark’s photographs, to the Dado’s powerful works, all these artists are looking for the creative shiver, as intense as the first time

This sweet and viloent quest for the absolute feeling guides their painting and reveals new colors and powers. In this exhibition artists explore their own universes as if they were hallucinations. Contrary to Serge Gainsbourg who asked the "Enfants de la chance" (title of one of his songs) not "to touch the dragon", this exhibition’s artists chase it and attempt to reach their own Nirvanas.

(thanks to galerie Eva Hober, galerie Beaubourg, Mr & Mrs B.)

Axel Pahalvi - courtesy Galerie Eva Hober	Peter Saul - I am sorry - 100x110cm - 1997	Jerôme Zonder - Garance et Baptiste sont à la campagne - 200x200cm - 2009 - courtesy Galerie Eva Hober
Jérôme Zonder - Pierre-François n'est pas la - 175x150 cm - 2009 - courtesy Galerie Eva Hober	Kosta Kulundzic - Dragon (detail)	Kosta Kulundzic - Saint George in Yokohama - 2010
Kosta Kulundzic - Work inprogress