Youthakone Soumpholphakdy

A marriage of ancestral traditions and hyper-contemporary aesthetics, Youthakone Soumpholphakdy's painting offers a poetic detour in which we can all glimpse our own relationship with the invisible.

A waking dream, or a nightmare in broad daylight.

Youthakone Soumpholphakdy offers us a plunge into another world, a gentle drift into infinite space, both pictorial and temporal, in which spectres appear in their most luminescent form, irradiating the canvases with a magical, deeply spiritual aura. Their world is made up of melancholy landscapes in acidulous colors, whose settings oscillate between a celestial universe and the dampness of a virgin forest. These creatures, with their labile, diaphanous bodies, float or sink from the canvas and seem to want to tell us something. They're not frightening, nor totally friendly, but certainly very much alive, and not so far away.

The canvases fascinate with their color, luminosity and enigmatic character. Each painting emanates a certain vibration, as if to remind us of the intensity of our existence, but also of its ephemeral aspect. They are not fictions, but representations of an altered spatio-temporal state, where animism and reincarnation are fully deployed.

The artist draws the subject of this series from the Buddhist and animist imaginary world stemming from his Laotian cultural heritage: the exhibition title – ຜີສ້າງ ນາງໄມ້ ເຈົ້າຖີ່ນ ເຈົ້າຖ້ານ. (Fantôme des fleurs des bois, tu es propriétaire de ces lieux), (Ghost of the Wildflowers, You Are the Master of This Place) – refers to a singular gesture that takes place during funeral ceremonies. To welcome the deceased into their new form of life, each person places water at the foot of a tree. In the same way as in Laos, offerings are made to the Phi, ghosts, guardians of places, nature spirits or ancestors, sometimes benevolent, often more or less malevolent. Far from being mere chimerical representations, they are entirely rooted in reality, and form an integral part of daily and cultural life in many Southeast Asian countries.

By evoking the Phi, Youthakone Soumpholphakdy’s work goes far beyond the usual representations of the ghost as a radical otherness, calling into question our convictions about identity and our certainties about belonging to the world of the living. It’s much more about celebrating what’s present within us, beside us and beyond. It’s a revelation of the ghostly presences that inhabit us, a celebration of the occult powers and telluric forces with which we coexist. The artist no longer invites us to see, but to experience; no longer to orient, but to drift... By appealing to our deepest emotional forces, Youthakone Soumpholphakdy’s work meanders between the individual and the planetary, between the present moment and the history of humanity as a whole.

—Juliette Lecorne

Youthakone Soumpholphakdy was born in Paris in 1988. Trained in graphic design at the Académie Charpentier, he developed his artistic practice as a self-taught artist.

He began his career as an illustrator, deploying a distinctive black-line style. This practice led him to collaborate with a number of brands, creating site-specific works for them, some up to 5 meters long. He has also created public works, notably a mural on the facade of the Collège Paul Valery in Paris XII. Valery college in Paris XII, in collaboration with the Mairie de Paris.

At the same time, Youthakone Soumpholphakdy developed his painting, and in 2018 in Paris presented his first solo exhibition. His series of abstract works focused on the shape of astral nebulae, which allowed the artist to deploy a certain taste for gaseous, immaterial and bewitching bodies. Far from confined to plastic writing, his practice extends to many other mediums: drawing, painting, sculpture, 3D video and stained glass.