It was in browsing the Internet that the choice of subjects was revealed to Laurent Joliton, while scrolling through a random series of Web pages. Anonymous figures, situations, snippets of life that start by intriguing and startling, then step out of the shadows of anonymity to become a creative subject.

A veritable Virtual Memory, the Web seems to catalogue all of human history. But won't such a massive consumption of images give rise to a kind of indifference or neglect of the subject ? By pulling out all the stops to record this history, or to contest it, isn't our society gradually diluting the impact of powerful images ?

Laurent Joliton seeks to counter this debate by simply exposing us to ourselves. This reflexive mission, that goes hand in hand with real life, reflects the extent to which memory efforts play out within each individual, and how such efforts actually shape the individual.

The choice of painting as the medium allows proceeding with this slow-motion approach, through questioning and offering a new perspective on the subject. Textural effects like thickening, blurring, shading, transparency add enough variety to demonstrate at which point a view of the subject is inextricably wed to the angle brought from our own experiences, our history and our memory.

As a result, the artist merges the image with the numerical effects produced by new technologies that he has reinterpreted and transposed onto the canvas like an underlying layer, a sort of malleable material.

Truncated images, blended images, hybridization of the subject using different numerical effects… just some of the raw material that Laurent Joliton has incorporated, redesigned and modeled, thus constantly vacillating between the figurative and the abstract.