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Large, very large paintings! The first impression you get is that of chaos, an entanglement of tormented shapes...
A magma... A collapse... An archaelogogical cataclysm from which the remains of sacrificial temples arise. A civilisation has left there statues shaped in blocks of salt in which human and animal creatures have become embedded. 
Concretions have settled down on the vessels that have been immersed in the sea for ages. One gets into a forest in which the crawling, the coiling, and the digestion of huge snakes is seen.

It seems, like in a nightmare, that the shapes bear one from others, swept along in a large onirical twirl. 
Skulls polished like pebbles, fragments of mutilated ribcages, pieces of bloody flesh, pieces of oesophagus and larynx, turgescent purplish red intestines... All those shapes suffer, are doubled over with pain, entangled as a huge dislocation. Amidst them appear figures and objects: ghosts of gods, humain or animal shapes, tentacles or scattered members, fruit, mushrooms, shells of sea animals or organic debris.


The colors run onto each other like sanies or blood. A smell of entrails catches you in the throat. Wherever the eye stops, there is only contorsion and suffering to be seen. There is no escape.

This tormented world is paradoxically a world of pastel tones: greens, mauves, light blues, ivory, with here and there some orange or pink colored blossoms! One can admire the same white nacreous splendors, pink with red patches, violets, yellow ocres... sown by the carcasses cut in two by the butcher’s chopper. In this tragic universe, these soft colors seem to be lit by torch beams to make creatures that have never seen the daylight come up from the depths. A frozen promontory sometimes stands, white and blue, the cold burning blocks of ice. Intense greys and blacks bring out these heap of characters made of chalk and ash. The painter’s Promothean ambition has led him to recount Genesis. The glow of the first days is that of sulfur, flesh and fire. 
The creation bathes in a luminous amniotic liquid in which which great cloud gashes twist. The whole universe is distorted in pain for its first birthings. Material comes from the jaws of time like the strips of flesh from Chronos’s sons devoured by their father.
Pieces of molten lava, columns of ashes coil up and disburse, spheres of incandescent metals that have not yet ben captured by gravitation spring out from the middle of huge twirls. The creation of the world in which we can see, on the same scale, the building up of a planet or the splitting of an ovum. Thus our cells stretch themselves, swallow and reproduce with the same erratic movements under the lens of the microscope or in the sideral infinities. Some shapes come up, caught in the twirls of this large-scale maelstrom. From eggs fertilized by cosmic semen, the fœtuses of the first creatures develop. Still linked to nothingness by an umbilical cord of stellar dust, they contract and convulse to free themselves from the original gangue.
Then large figures appear: a gigantic christ on a cross comes to save or curse the world. The horse of death comes to establish its reign and the very first entities impose their power. Humanity, until the trumpets of the Apocalypse have been heard, will have to undergo a long route of fears and sufferings under their domination.
In the center of the painting often stand fearsome entities: Hermes Trismegiste, alchemist and sorcerer, the master of mercury, salt and sulfur and all his sisters, the almighty goddesses. From them filaments emerge which twist round like snakes or tetanized members. They are braided with algae, caught in shrouds made of spider yarns, inlaid with shells, bone debris, unhealthy ganglions and rough shapes of creatures that form at the expense of their substance. They watch over dead temples, large architectures where priests and gods have been consecrated. They are the gorgonia whose body is covered with neural filaments, the divining Sphinx dressed with the tatters of her victims, ready to devour the one who is not aware, Hecate the three-headed sorcerer, the entity of darkness, the goddess of the moon, mother of illusion, accompanied by dogs howling to death and holds against her breast some poisoned apples. Somewhere in the painting, the painter watches. 
A head, his head, his portrait, represented as an outgrowth on a rock, can be recognized at his lucid eye as his gaze rests on us. 
Around him, coming from him, his familiar creatures go around. He knows them as he is their father, their creator. They come out of him, he has been bearing them. They protect him, console him, and squeeze up against each other, creating compact oases of tenderness. Busy, thoughtful ghosts come close to him, skim past him, a bird puts its leg on his shoulder, a pink and blue feminine shape stretch out a sympathetic arm, and mates dressed in white clothes have loving gestures towards him... The pet animals come closer to him, seeking his protection, although they are intended for sacrifices: lambs, does, small rodents, goats and billy goats, dogs that pain make aggressive, and in particular horses that are sent to the abattoir: prominent bones, bloody viscera, head that have turned to neighing skulls that are still suffering.

Some lines delineate in these paintings large rectangular strips. Vast reflecting surfaces where the same subjects, the same shapes are reflected in a set of mirrors. Creatures escape from them, human or animal figures that come and haunt the foreground of the painting. They reply to each other and communicate from one canvas to the other, throwing here and there an arm, a root, a tentacle. The artist is encircled by his creations. 
It seems to emanate from the world that he mothered and live through it. Through his canvases he can escape to landscapes where blocks of lava pile up, where tormented clouds are outlined against the light of the sky. There he visits these monuments, these steles, these tombs. It is the place where he can question the dark entities. In his work he can reach those spaces crossed by meteorites and haunt those nights inhabited by indistinct shapes and the howling of the wolves. In his gigantic paintings, he took his momentum, deployed shapes which put in the face of our world another creation issued from his own depth and from his own torments and from his own torments. A creation digested and regurgitated, spit out like a compact heap of things which oppress him. He has explored inside his own body both the beating of his arteries and the ins and outs of his thoughts, the torsions of his entrails, his aspirations, his fits of anger, the way he feels life, both psychically and organically.

A mixture of viscera, of hightened passions, internal coilings and mystical fervor. A real upheaval in which his physiological and mental digestions, his thoughts, his compulsions and this suffering that is being brandished as a challenge mix together. Is there an answer to this inner world that, in front of us, yells out in pain? In spite of consolating representations of human and animal tenderness, each work contorts like a long body which is prey to Gehenna and seems to be a criticism of the whole of Nature and to the evil which is there.
An immense painting seems to represent a break, a step in Arnaud’s work. It is an Eden where the torments are soothed. At the third point of the painting, a pillar seems to hold the heavy vault of heaven. At the bottom of it Cerberus watches the dog seated in front of the door of Hell. In the distance, there is a pale gap where dead stars revolve. A castle in ruins is outlined against the light of a sulfur sky. But there, we are in limbo where evil is kept at a distance. A block stands out against the darkness of the night. The statues sculpted in this promontory look like foreheads watching the horizon. They are tightly held together, fixed in the lava and salt, yet their eyes on the look-out seem to be waiting. Here again there are figures of women and animals, stuck in a white silt with greenish reflections, with cavities as in pumice stone, these writhing roots and this petrified mud, yet a certain serenity seems to hang over the creatures. The pastel colors that cover the animal vegetation growing and coiling up on the right handside provide a feeling of appeased sumptuousness. This world is an expecting world but, for the first time, it seems to have a premonition of redemption. 

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Contact: plaindoux.peintre@free.fr design: Audrey Lefeuvre