A travelling artist, Thomas Auriol (1987, Vouziers, France) divides his time between the Côtes d’Armor and Andalusia. An accomplished sportsman, he extends his sailing and paragliding explorations in his paintings. Recently, he took part in an expedition on the «Artic Lab», a sailing boat that uses science and education to raise awareness of entropic pollution and global warming. This voyage is part of the artist’s research into the issues of climate change, which he tries to transcribe - never literally - in his paintings. Thomas Auriol feels like a “rabbit caught in the headlights of a car” when he receives new messages about climate change. He seeks to bear witness to this state of stupefaction, confronting us with grandiose landscapes, sometimes tending towards abstraction. He takes us without geographical clues to the sea, the roads or the fjords, using poetry and strangeness. Dreams, documents and hallucinations are often intertwined: figures emerge from a landscape or shapes emerge from a nebula. Thomas Auriol uses his personal experiences to highlight broad themes that are common to us all. The condition of “being an artist”, and in particular solitude and the precariousness that goes with it, are also at the heart of the exhibition, through the underlying questions: how do you make a living from painting? What makes for comfort?

The title of the exhibition, ‘A Good Year for Roses’, can have many meanings, from the work of a gardener to the success of a sports team or an artist’s choice of colours. Painting is also polysemous, allowing us to project an infinite number of thoughts and feelings. Interpretations are open-ended, even if the titles offer visitors some clues.