Léo Pansard, painter and visual artist

He grew up in Armenia, in a family with Armenian and Greek roots on his mother's side, Austro-Hungarian and Russian on his father's. Drawn to colour, form and texture from his teens, he entered the National Academy of Fine Arts in Yerevan at 17 to study art history and applied arts. At the Vazgenian Seminary he discovered abstraction, a revelation that has shaped all his painting since. Yet he sees himself as largely self-taught: school was a trigger rather than a framework.

At twenty, after two solo shows in Yerevan, he moved to France. The South, its light, its beaches and its Mediterranean villages became the material of his canvases, along with the encounters and emotions he lives there. His first exhibition in Monaco, in December 2022, was a turning point; in 2024 the City of Nice presented Riviera at the Lou Babazouk municipal gallery.

His painting starts from the three primaries, red, blue and yellow: the basis of every other colour and, for him, the most direct form of emotion. He paints in oil on canvas or linen, with brush, float and knife, sometimes adding gilding or charred fabric. His canvases hold the memory of places and of human encounters.

Alongside painting, he designs room-scale installations and performances, often participatory: childhood with Solitude, discrimination with Le Mur de Lamentation and Les Traces, exile with La Terre des Frontières and Déracinés, hunger with 8 250 000 000, the artist's place with La Mort d'un Artiste. Several grow out of his own story.