Gaël Caron

Hello, my name is Gaël Caron. I’m a contemporary artist and art director, graduated from Gobelins, l’école de l’image, with further training in advertising at DDB Paris. Based in Paris, I create drawings using oil pastels, portraying my everyday experiences with a gentle and poetic perspective. My vivid and precise strokes reflect an attentive gaze toward subjects such as adolescence, social media, ordinary objects, fragments of landscapes, and diverse portraits. My work aims to capture subtle, fleeting emotions from real-life scenes, continually balancing softness and intensity.

“Through oil pastel, I sculpt emotional spaces where each hue of color becomes a precise word, capturing the poetry of everyday banality. My art breathes fragility and the subtle tension of a precarious era, where color structures and embodies far more than mere optical illusion.”

6 questions with Gaël Caron

We ask our emerging artists 6 questions to uncover what drives their work, practice, and creativity.

What themes or questions do you find recurring in your work?

What fascinates me is the poetry that emerges from the folds of the everyday. I’m drawn to what others tend to overlook. My favourite themes include still life (though I’m not fond of the term), fragments of landscape, the body, the portrait, my surroundings, my travels, adolescence, and the digital presence of women. I observe what seems insignificant, because that’s often where the essential hides.

Can you describe a pivotal moment in your journey as an artist?

The moment I realised that art was more than a passion — it was a refuge. A vital space, almost therapeutic. And with that realisation came an urgent desire to show. A visceral need to reveal the world as I see it, and to invite others in. Since then, creating has become as instinctive as breathing.

What materials or processes are most important in your practice - and why?

Oil pastel is my primary medium. It’s dense, tactile, almost sensual — a way of translating the poetry of reality. I work in layers, like a traditional painter, blending expressive strokes with deliberate structure. But above all, there is colour. Colour is the beating heart of my work. It matters more to me than volume or perspective. Everything I do is colour — it shapes, inhabits, breathes. Each hue is chosen like a precise word. I see myself as an architect of colour and sensation — I don’t build illusions, I build emotional spaces. Oil pastel also offers a rare kind of fragility: it never fully dries. Even when varnished, it remains vulnerable, exposed to the outside world. I find that uncertainty fascinating. It gives each piece a quiet tension, a kind of precariousness that mirrors our own time.

How do you want people to feel when they experience your work?

If a single glance can stir something — a flicker of poetry, a sensual pull toward the real, the simple beauty of a forgotten moment — then I’ve succeeded. My drawings aim for that: emotion first, then reflection. Beyond the aesthetic, they question our relationship with the everyday. They offer a kind of soft and fiery inventory of the lives we lead. Like a poppy: a wildflower full of vigour and grace, whose beauty is matched only by its fragility.

What does a typical day in your studio look like?

Coffee. Open books. Crackling vinyls. Old cassette tapes on loop. And pastels scattered everywhere, like a quiet army on standby. It’s a lived-in chaos.

What dreams or hopes do you have for your artistic journey?

I want to share the beauty of what we no longer see. These fleeting moments we take for granted, these gestures and silences that vanish into routine. I know now — I was born to share them. And one day — I’m certain of it — my work will be shown at the Grand Palais in Paris, at Perrotin, or at Gagosian. Not for glory, but to flood the world with poetry. That will be my way of responding to it. And it will serve it right.