Anide

Anide (born 1994 in Lyon, lives and works in Paris) approaches painting as a space where forms, memories, and perceptions surface only to recede again. His name, created from the fusion of “an” meaning absence and “eidos” meaning form, encapsulates the guiding tension in his practice: what appears briefly enough to unsettle, what refuses fixed identity, what exists in the intervals between states.

His path into painting emerged gradually through earlier work in communication and photography, where he became attuned to the shifting borders between image, narrative, and the unconscious. A decisive period took place at Studio H13 in Lyon, an environment shaped by alternative cultural scenes, followed by several years in London that exposed him to queer punk communities, surrealist visual languages, and experimental approaches to making images. These experiences deepened his interest in ambiguity, transformation, and the suggestive power of partial revelation.

Now based in Paris, he continues a practice influenced by mythology, ancient philosophy, Jungian psychology, and contemporary poetry. These sources act not as references to be illustrated but as vocabularies that shape his thinking about interior states, symbolic memory, and the porous frontier between the visible and the imagined. He works without preparatory drawings, allowing each painting to unfold through improvisation. Forms appear spontaneously, shift, are veiled or erased, then return altered. This process creates surfaces where presences seem suspended, never fully revealed yet impossible to dismiss.

His palette often moves between pearly greys, deep blues, ochres, and charcoal tones, creating subtle tensions of light, warmth, and density. Figures seem to hover at the edge of recognition, as if paused between apparition and disappearance. In his work, illusion is not a device but a perceptual inquiry, prompting viewers to question how they recognise, misrecognise, or project meaning onto what they see.

Rather than depicting defined scenes or characters, his paintings operate as thresholds, places where memory and imagination overlap and where symbols rise to the surface only to submerge again. Curator Moritz Wassmuth wrote that “the essence of Anide’s work seems to hide like ghosts behind the curtain of our consciousness.” His practice embraces this quality of elusiveness, offering images that remain open, mutable, and alive, meeting viewers at the moment when recognition gives way to deeper perception.