Ronan Barrot, born in 1973 is a French painter. He entered the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1991, from where he graduated with honor in 1997. In 2001, the Gallery Trafic discovered his work and threw his first solo exhibition: ‘Cataractes’. In 2006, he was exhibited at the Marc Chagall Museum in Nice. Since 2007, the gallery Claude Bernard has represented him, devoted to him numerous collective and personal exhibitions and presented his work in various international events and fairs such as: FIAC, BRAFA, ArtParis. Many of Barrot’s works, which have already entered important private collections both in France and abroad, are now included in national museum’s collections : the Museum of Modern Art of the city of Paris, Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of the city of Strasbourg, FRAC Ile-de-France-Le-Plateay and FRAC Auvergne.
He owns some profound influences: among other masters, Goya and Courbet from whom he drifts his matter, his material, his light, his play with the reinvention of the colors and his passion for contrasting dark and light hues. At the same time portraitist, landscape painter, Vanity painter, often nostalgic, constantly visionary, illusionist sometimes, he masters all the genres he interweaves with bravado and ultimate accuracy. As classical as he is contemporary, Ronan Barrot is surprising at a time when art is mainly turned on the conceptual side. He owns the History of Art – and his work attests to this – down to its smallest nooks. As an artist to whom the favourite medium is oil, he could fall into the category of ‘figurative’ art. However, he in fact submits the viewer, by the apparent subject that his canvas deals with, a multitude of possibilities of interpretation, to which could then apply the terms “realistic”, “utopian”, “surreal” and event “abstract”.
Because he never omits the tribute he owes to the old masters, because he never neglects the mythology that founded so many of his works and of which so many contemporary artists nowadays are forgetful, his work acquires a dimension as powerful as it is scholarly.