The kiss of the dear

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Ludovic Thiriez
The Kiss of the Deer, 2023

Mixed media on canvas
50 × 40 cm

With "The Kiss of the Deer," Ludovic Thiriez presents a suspended scene, halfway between an inner landscape and a symbolic apparition. At the center of the composition, a human figure appears to lean toward a deer in a gesture of unexpected softness, almost ritualistic. The contact suggested by the title — this “kiss” — transforms the encounter into a moment of transition: a fragile instant where human and animal meet within a shared space, silent and contemplative.

The scene unfolds within a landscape of uncertain contours, where lilac mountains, dark vegetal masses and stretches of water with bluish reflections construct a setting that feels both familiar and psychological. Thiriez fragments this environment through graphic lines, colored planes and deliberately abraded areas that disrupt the conventional reading of the landscape. Pictorial gestures, sometimes rapid and almost accidental, coexist with more constructed surfaces, creating a fertile tension between spontaneity and composition.

The deer, a warm and luminous silhouette with orange and pink tonalities, becomes the visual anchor of the painting. Its presence seems to radiate within the pictorial space, contrasting with the deeper greens and cooler blues of the surrounding landscape. This chromatic polarity gives the animal an almost mythic dimension, as if it were emerging from another plane of reality. The human figure, by contrast, appears partially dissolved within the painted matter, as though absorbed by the landscape that surrounds it.

As is often the case in Ludovic Thiriez’s work, the painting oscillates between narrative figuration and gestural abstraction. Discreet lines, graphic marks and traces of construction traverse the canvas, suggesting invisible coordinates, axes or points of reference. Rather than imposing a fixed interpretation, these signs open the pictorial space to a more intuitive reading, allowing the viewer’s gaze to move freely between planes, textures and figures.

This painting fully belongs to the artist’s distinctive universe: a territory where nature, animals and human silhouettes become the protagonists of silent narratives. Here, Thiriez explores a relationship to the living world that is neither descriptive nor illustrative, but poetic and sensory. The work invites the viewer to slow down, to observe the layered surface of the painting and to be carried by this improbable encounter between human and animal — a scene that is at once simple, mysterious and deeply contemporary.

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