Working in a diverse range of mediums, from acrylic and oil to charcoal and mixed media, the contemporary New Orleans based artist Louis Braquet (born in 1988) developed a distinctive language of figurative painting in which the human body is simultaneously sensual, theatrical and strangely elusive. Although the paintings depict recognisable women and familiar situations, undressing, dressing before a mirror, standing together, their real subject is less the nude body than the unstable space between private experience and public performance. Braquet’s figures appear caught in moments of transition, and his vigorous handling of paint makes these moments feel provisional, as though the bodies and their surroundings are continually emerging and disappearing.
Fig.1 Louis Braquet, Duet in Blue, 2024
Fig.2 Louis Braquet, Disrobing, 2017
Fig.3 Louis Braquet, Alone With You, 2021
Aggressively Painterly Surface
One of the most striking characteristics of Braquet’s style is his combination of figurative realism with an aggressively painterly surface. The figures are sufficiently observed to possess weight, anatomy and physical presence, yet they are never presented with the polished finish associated with academic realism. Instead, the paint remains visible as paint. Broad strokes, scraped passages, broken edges and areas of exposed or semi-exposed ground interrupt the contours of the bodies. In Fig.2. in a painting titled seductively as ‘Disrobing’, for example, the pink and the red environment seems to invade the figures themselves. The boundaries between flesh, clothing and background are repeatedly dissolved in Braque’s treatment of the female nude. The effect is not simply decorative: it gives the scene a sense of movement and instability, as though the women are being recalled through memory rather than objectively recorded.
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Psychological Temperature
Colour plays an equally important role. Braquet appears to use colour emotionally rather than merely descriptively. Painting seen in Fig.2. is dominated by an intense, almost feverish red and pink, while ‘Duet in Blue’, seen in Fig.1., is constructed around saturated turquoise and blue. Painting seen in Fig.3. shifts into violet and purple. These colours establish the psychological temperature of each scene before the viewer has fully deciphered its narrative. The backgrounds are not neutral spaces in which the figures happen to exist; they become active participants in the composition. They press against the bodies, surround them and sometimes seem to absorb them.
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Conspicuously Unnatural
This is particularly effective because Braquet sets highly sensual flesh tones against artificial, almost theatrical colours. The human body retains warmth, peach, pink, ochre and brown, while the environments are conspicuously unnatural. This opposition creates a tension between the organic and the constructed. His women seem physically present, but their surroundings suggest the stage, the dressing room, the backstage area or the world of fashion and performance. The paintings therefore occupy an ambiguous territory between intimate observation and theatrical display.
Fig.8 Louis Braquet, Dead End Angels
In the extended Premium edition of the article you can find a further analysis of Braquet’s erotic aesthetics, its color palette and psychological temperature, the "doubling of identity' technique, an extensive study of Braque's nudes, the important temporal quality in these paintings, and MUCH more...
Louis Braquet is active on Instagram
Click HERE for the aesthetic ecstasy of the neck pose depicted in sensual art
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