Abraham Aronovitch

Abraham Aronovitch is a French figurative painter, born in 1953. An ophthalmic surgeon by profession, he has devoted himself to painting, self-taught, for some fifteen years. He lives and works in Paris; his studio, in the Marais, can be visited by appointment.

Since 2021, he has been painting Behind the Obvious: 31 acrylic paintings in which a blue figure faces the bathroom mirror. Before this series, he produced pop art sculptures, sculpted paintings, matter paintings and the Yes/No series, shown in a solo exhibition at 24Beaubourg (Yes/No, Paris, 2022). He exhibited at the Salon d’Automne in Paris in 2024, 2025 and 2026. His works are available on Artsper.

His answers to the questions he is asked · Press area

A French visual artist based in Paris, Abraham Aronovitch is committed to a contemporary painting practice rooted in figurative representation with an oneiro-existential scope.

His influences range from Marlène Dumas, for her direct confrontation with reality, to Alex Katz, whose apparent simplicity opens onto a subtle depth, and extend to Matisse and the silent power of his chromatic planes.

Abraham Aronovitch’s work marks a decisive shift: from mere representation to metaphysical inquiry. Situated within the field of Neo-Existential Figuration, his practice mobilises intimacy not as a refuge, but as a space of radical examination. The bathroom mirror—emblematic of the Behind the Obvious series—is elevated to the status of a rhetorical device, compelling the subject towards an essential confrontation.

The artist explores the ontological fracture between projected identity (the image) and lived identity (being). The fixed figure is exposed in its ambivalence, embodying the weight of consciousness prior to the adoption of the social mask. Aronovitch materialises this inner silence, allowing an existential gravity to emerge through a staging marked by restraint.

The analytical strength of Aronovitch’s work rests on a form of formal asceticism. His choice of acrylic flat fields reflects a deliberate intention to reduce pictorial language to its essential core, privileging immediacy of impact over descriptive excess.

Chromatic Blue, the artist’s signature hue, stands at the centre of this aesthetic. It operates as a semantic colour: depersonalising the individual in order to inscribe the figure within a universal typology. The individual becomes an archetype, withdrawn from temporal coordinates by a tonality that evokes both melancholy and the immensity of being.

Aronovitch categorically refuses to confine the figure to a definitive emotional state. His figures exist within a state of perpetual tension, holding the work in suspension. It is precisely through this unresolved condition that his painting remains fundamentally open to otherness.

The viewer is invited to bridge the gulf of painted solitude. The work is not a conclusion, but a proposition. By offering a figure rendered transparent in its uncertainty, the artist reactivates the role of the viewer, whose existential involvement becomes the ultimate generator of meaning. Aronovitch’s painting unfolds as an unfinished act of revelation, requiring the intervention of a “You” so that the image, rather than closing in on itself, opens onto the field of relation.