untitled. oil on canvas. 37.5 x 55 cm

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untitled. oil on canvas. 100 x 140 cm, 2009

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la caisse à papa blanche. oil on canvas. 150 x 195 cm. 2009

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French artist DAVID LEFEBVRE is a “low def” painter (artist who takes images, videos or drawings from diverse,”mediocre” and sometimes banal source to manipulate them).

His subjects are inconsequential (a nightclub, a delivery scene, a supermodel, a prefabricated building, a mountain lake, a chicken in the grass) and their origins unexceptional (photos cut out of magazines or taken with mobile phones, videos from YouTube, MMS messages). Insignificant in themselves, the pictorial treatment of these images as “paintings” nonetheless modifies their status, although as “works of art” they do not claim to show anything that might justify them as such. Quite the contrary – to the extent that they seem close to banality, the first thing that is visible is an “raw effect”.

DAVID LEFEBVRE paints fast, he accepts the fact that paint runs, and he leaves parts of his canvases intact. He does not seek to “do it right”, even if it would be tempting to use a sophisticated technique – because his subjects do not deserve such sublimation. LEFEBVRE’s “low definition” painting appears as “the result of an ambiguous taste for things, and as blogs on MySpace, resulting from a simple appetite for gesture.” – by Galerie Zürcher