Adam Drouet

Email:: adam@drouet.fsnet.co.uk

Statement

As a painter Adam is preoccupied with the figure located in the landscape and other real or imagined spaces. His work is concerned with how we perceive our environment, and are in turn perceived by others within it.

Adam's most recent series of paintings, inspired by the life and works of Paul Gauguin, explores his physical, mental and artistic search for a primitive paradise and an understanding of an instinctive human condition. The title of his most famous painting – Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? – asks fundamental questions about human nature and identity which every generation seeks to answer. Gauguin’s quest ultimately led to despair and death. Are our chances of finding ourselves in paradise in the modern world any better?

These paintings deal with many ideas, such as whether paradise is a physical place we must travel to, or a personal identity and state which we create for ourselves wherever we are. Migration, religion, environmental issues, technology, virtual worlds, alter-egos and avatars, money, sex and culture all come into play.

Developing Gauguin’s visual language of symbolism, Adam borrows some of his symbols directly, alter others and invent new visual metaphors and allusions. An eclectic range of source images are used to create the paintings. While conveying a coherent theme, the paintings remain ambiguous, discomfiting and mysterious, and can be read in many ways by the viewer. Adam loves these qualities in Gauguin’s work. An element of humour and playfulness is also injected into the subjects.

Paint is applied in a variety of ways and figurative details may be more or less tightly resolved; colour and composition are important elements, and the images maintain a constant tension between flatness and depth, dream and reality.

Sept 2002 – Jun 2009: Tertiary Education
Part-Time BA (Hons) Fine Art Degree
University College Falmouth
Wood Lane, Falmouth, Cornwall TR11 4RH

1987 – 2001: Further Education
Part-time art courses at a number of institutions, especially:
Kingsway College, Holmes Road, Kentish Town, London N5
which I attended 1992 - 2001

Shows and Exhibitions
June 2009: Degree Show, University College Falmouth,
Wood Lane, Falmouth

August 2007: Summer Show, Devoran Art Society, Devoran, Nr Truro, Cornwall

April 2006: Easter Group Show, Trelowarren Estate Studios, Nr Helston, Cornwall

April 2001: Start Gallery, Fulham Palace Road, London SW6 – group show of six artists’ work

2002 – 2004: Painted with Portscatho Group of Artists (ref. ‘Portscatho - Portrait of a Cornish Artist Colony’ by Chris Insoll, Halsgrove Press, published 2006)

July 1991: Super 8 Gallery, Dunedin, New Zealand – group show