Current Paris Show
After two decades of focusing on making sculpture Yuval Shaul has recently returned to painting. Shaul’s current practice features colourful abstract paintings created using oil paints mixed with industrial metal paints, thinners and yacht varnishes, which interact with each other creating dynamic compositions. This unique personal painting process marks his own individual practice of ‘action painting’. The results are paintings that are distinctive in surface and complex in texture
Shaul’s layered and seductive paintings are created through a process that sees him working as an artist in an alchemical way. He obsessively mixes materials and creates his dynamic compositions by lifting the papers in different directions and propping them up on various stands so that the colours mix, drip, run and eventually settle.
Masculinity in an ever-changing world and the 21st century's power struggles between genders, generations and cultures are issues that are at the heart of Shaul’s practice. For years he reflected on these social changes and power struggles using sculpture. Since 2019, he has set aside his sculpture preferring to use the language of abstract painting with its tensions that are created as a result of the process, the materials and the mark making. Like contemporary musical compositions, using paints as his ‘instruments’, Shaul creates movement and tension in an on-going harmonious dialogue between colour and form.