Julien Rupp is a French German artist painter. Born in 1995, works and lives in Paris, France. After studying law—a field that clearly did not suit him—Julien Rupp decided to confront his own psychological anxieties through the medium of painting. The artist is not seeking an aesthetic formula, but rather the expression of his own psyche, from a perspective that might evoke Art Brut, seeking to distance himself from a form of alienation in order to neutralize it through aesthetic forms. Constantly wavering between abstraction and figuration, the artist works with combinations of colors and lines, harmonies he intends to be unsettling yet pleasing to the eye at the same time. Julien Rupp has a fascination with stripes, and even with erasures. They serve, in one way or another, to occupy the space of the canvas, initially to provide structure, and subsequently to spill over the motifs, or even replace them. They thus give the impression of holding them together, but within a blurred composition. The prominence of lines and bands is evident in most of these works, with a consistent desire to encumber the figures they depict. These are bands that enclose, highlight, and overlap. At times, there is a desire to cross out, evoking palisade-like forms that suggest the difficulty of stepping outside oneself to reach out to others—and vice versa. Despite a strong interest in abstract art, Julien Rupp employs an abstraction that remains figurative because it uses lines and colors that do not detach from the contours. The artist thus seeks to remain in this in-between space that defines his relationship to the world. For his work is constantly nourished by a hesitation between external reality and his own inner reality, perpetually caught in this back-and-forth that shapes his gaze and impacts his senses. Thus, the themes chosen by the artist, despite their variety, are divided into two poles: the first oriented toward a reality evoking different worlds—maritime, urban, festive, and so on. The second is more spiritual and inward-looking, in dreamlike dimensions with “Dreams,” linked to states of mind or impressions captured on the spot, or even a simple idea, a symbol. Her many influences are easily discernible and, moreover, embraced. She reveals a boundless curiosity for her predecessors in art. Whether it is Sean Scully, Pierre Soulages, Gerhart Richter, Francis Bacon, Oskar Kokoschka, Mark Rothko, or Frank Auerbach, all these artists provide her with material to organize her own feelings. Artists from whom she sometimes borrows a specific vocabulary of grids, lines, and colored bands that form a varied visual field. While he borrows much of his vocabulary from Abstract Expressionism, Rupp draws it into his own pictorial universe to reveal fleeting emotions, barely glimpsed visions that leave only a blurred, barely recognizable impression, yet persist and assert themselves in his imagination. In his portraits, the face is of secondary importance. It may be crossed out, blurred, or simply absent. For the artist, it matters little whether a figure is abstract or concrete. The focus here is not on recognition, but on a more intimate understanding of psychological states. The motif is merely a pretext. By favoring anonymity—sometimes with headless bodies—the artist seeks to identify what preoccupies him most in daily life: this constant questioning of his own anxieties regarding identity. This perseverance permeates his canvases. Alienation confines. Stepping outside oneself to better return to it could sum up Julien Rupp’s quest, using painting as a witness through those illustrious predecessors who never cease to inspire him.