Galerie Gabel presents a close-up of the paintings of Etienne Gros, a graduate of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts de Paris and winner of the Grand Prix Azart in 2006.

Etienne Gros paints and sculpts bodies...

"Bodies are swept by light and shadow, tattooed with pigments unless they appear, evanescent in a random cloud of smoke.

Strength is no longer in question.

Here, powerful flesh seems made of stone; there, blushing, incandescent, it is sensual, and bodies coil, limbs entwine, interlock, zoomed in to the point of abstraction.

In the end, you can make out the nape of the neck? Are they crossed legs, intertwined fingers?

They're there, attractive, addictive!"

It was the sooty deposit left by a flame that was to give “body” to what Etienne Gros calls his “smoke drawings”. He uses the flame of a candle or a paraffin lamp to trace unpredictable, delicate, soft lines of immense fragility on sheets of white paper.

No brushes, pencils, or any other of the artist’s usual tools are involved. Etienne draws with whorls of smoke, letting himself be bewitched by the random patterns traced by the smoke. Sometimes the result is pure magic, sometimes not. He calls on the fire in his studio to free genies from lamps, like Aladdin, while taking us far, far back in time, to the dawn of mankind.