Lyo

Born in 1973 in Meudon, Lyonel Thouvenot, aka Lyo, is a French visual artist whose unique career combines early passion, academic training, and a strong creative background.

Gesture, line, and material have always accompanied him: as a child, he spent hours drawing, exploring museums, and being captivated by painting, sculpture, opera, and dance. Early on, he became fascinated by primitive arts, particularly African masks and fetishes, which he discovered as objects of power, vibration, and narrative, bearers of a collective and spiritual memory.

His taste for the archaic dialogues with a deep admiration for the great masters of classical painting, which he constantly revisits through his own gestures.

In Paris, Lyo studied visual arts and the philosophy of art at the Sorbonne, staging his first exhibitions at a young age. He subsequently delved into graphic design and became a creative director and creative producer for major international brands, perfecting his sense of signs, powerful images, and visual narrative.

Today, fully returned to his personal practice, Lyo creates works dominated by accumulation, saturation, and contrast. On his canvases, faces, silhouettes, and words appear and overlap in vibrant layers. Each spontaneous gesture, each trace of automatic writing, contributes to a dense, almost hypnotic visual construction.

The vivid colors, often disruptive, create a magnetic field where chaos finds balance. His painting is linked to the art brut of Jean Dubuffet, the urban energy of Basquiat, the gestural poetry of Cy Twombly, and the organic materiality of Tàpies, while also asserting the ritual influence of primitive art.

Each of Lyo’s paintings is a field of tension and freedom: a surface saturated with signs, scribbled words, and chromatic contrasts that express the intensity of his inner tensions. Painting becomes for him an instinctive search, an attempt to grasp the unspeakable and deliver it, vibrant, to the viewer’s gaze.