MY ARTISTIC PRACTICE

Inspirations and themes 
Saleh Lo's artistic practice is essentially based on hyperrealistic painted portraits - in various formats - of people he meets during his research. Through his biography, he is interested in people living on the margins of society. Through their portraits, he wants to give them visibility, dignity and value. The political situation in Mauritania, his country of origin, has played a major role in the research topics that have informed his practice, i.e. the phenomenon of street children, the situation of mixed race and slavery that still exists in his country despite the abolition in the 1980s. While during his artistic residencies, for example, in France and India, he worked respectively with migrants and people from castes called "untouchables", still minority categories. It is from exchanges (interviews and photo sessions) with these people that Saleh Lo retraces their stories and creates a visual narrative from his portraits. The themes of his paintings are not banal subjects but people who carry a message that the artist wants to communicate. In this way, Saleh Lo puts a special emphasis on social, cultural or political themes. As a result, the discourse that Saleh Lo brings to bear on the human condition can be striking because his hyperrealist works combine sensitive themes with an ability to reproduce reality accurately.

Method used
Saleh Lo's artistic practice meets the criteria of hyperrealism. Saleh Lo uses his camera to gather information and photograph the person he wants to represent on the canvas. He himself chooses the model and the facial expression and determines the staging. Generally, he uses three types of portraits: the waist shot, the bust shot and the tight or very tight shot, but he prefers the last two because these two frames put the emphasis on the gaze, facial features and facial expression. To reproduce the image on the canvas, he either projects it with an overhead projector or uses the "mise au carre" technique. Then he goes to the easel, using oil paints, acrylics, or a combination of the two. His paintings are usually 10 to 20 times larger than the original photographic reference source, while maintaining a very high resolution of colour, precision and detail.

Style
The aim of Saleh Lo's hyperrealism is not limited to the perfect reproduction of reality. His paintings are not the pale copies of a photographic sensor, but his touch remains detectable. In Saleh Lo's figurative paintings, subjects are treated through his vision, his sensitivity and the message he wants to convey. A psychological intensity emerges from the hand work, and through a slow and laborious method, Saleh Lo wants to induce the audience to an intense concentration produced by the myriad artistic decisions behind the choice of model and the creation of the image itself. In Saleh Lo's portraits, every trace and layer left by the brush is also clearly visible, as it represents for the artist the breadth, complexity and richness of the human soul. This is also why Saleh Lo's paintings sometimes have an unfinished appearance. Parts of the canvas are not painted and parts of the sketch are still visible. By this he means that just as the story of the extras and/or the theme they represent are not finished, the portrait too is not finished and suggests a possible continuation or change. At other times, he simulates tears in the portraits, to indicate internal tears or a multiplicity in the identities of the people.
As a result, Saleh Lo's portraits do not strictly tend to imitate photographic images because human emotion, political value and narrative elements are the main keys to reading his works. Through his touch, Saleh Lo wants to create a softer and much more complex accent on the subject.

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In addition to the technique of hyperrealism, Saleh Lo practices abstract. Indeed, he began to learn painting by mixing colors on a canvas. He has always been attracted by abstract because it was a way to talk with colors, to understand them, analyze them and combine them with each other. Each colour has a meaning for him and the abstract represents his more intimate and visceral relationship with colours. He mixes them on large canvases, on my hands, on papers, superimposing one layer on top of the other.