Under the veil of violence I discovered sadness.
And in the heart of sadness, a need for love.
(Axel Pahlavi)


A fallen torero falls backwards; Christ, bloody face, stares at us with his bruised eye; a 1970's-style cosmic fresco tells us about the revolution in Iran; the assumption of a B-series teenager heals the horror of a crime. The curtains open, the lights come on: a return to reality. Two sad drilles in carnival costumes are talking and singing sitting on the floor. A figure advances: self-portrait as a rider of the loving father. Florence, finally, beloved model and wife of the painter, offered as a mother, a lover, a clown. Languor of vague nudities with lost glances.

Motley, Axel Pahlavi's work comes in infinite gradations of materials and manners, sometimes virtuoso, sometimes more trashy. Thick and saturated colors, meticulous touch, paint as vivid as a scratch. Here the eclecticism of the registers is not afraid to flirt with the limits of good taste, when the composition turns to the staging and Chardin meets Albator. The artist is reckless, who sets flesh and shadow ablaze under the electric sci-fi skies, or embraces in secret alcoves the most intimate of anecdotes with the most edifying of parables.

It must be said that this painting has freed itself from the injunction to please and that the relationship it builds has nothing to do with seduction. It is indeed (almost) without make-up that she gives herself up to us, forcing us to set aside the most stubborn reluctance, to look otherness in the face to finally welcome it, as in a vow of shared love. Everything seems imbued with spirituality, but an embodied spirituality, instinctual and primary, which makes the body the seat of reality, the place of truth, hidden under the tense skin. This body, the setting of a painful intimacy that you have to face without worry, so much can it be a source of wonder.

And if melodrama is never far away, it is not free. From canvas to canvas, Axel Pahlavi, on the contrary, describes the infinite story of an excessive, paradoxical, brutal humanity. A disjointed story, constructed by analogies and which, like the images it conveys, like the painting itself, resists any definitive interpretation, on the contrary preserving this so particular mystery that unquiet contests with Grace.

Thibault Bissirier, November 2020