Gaël Caron and the search for density

Loïse Pannier
Nov 21, 2025
5 min read

Gaël Caron in his studio

Gaël Caron is a contemporary artist and art director based in Paris. Trained at ESAAT in Roubaix, the Beaux-Arts de Paris, and a graduate of Gobelins, he discovered his passion for oil pastels — a medium he continues to explore for its unique density and sensitivity.

Through this fragile and vibrant material, he captures the poetry of everyday life: fragments of ordinary existence, fleeting moments of adolescence, and human figures caught within a world shaped by the digital age. His works are defined by a subtle balance between softness, tension, and fragility, where each color holds the precision of a carefully chosen word.

True to his guiding principle, “to make visible what is no longer seen”, Gaël approaches art as a space for breathing, an instinctive gesture that reveals the quiet beauty of our time.

Why did you choose oil pastel as a medium ? It’s a very sensitive material, one that never really dries. How do you approach it when you work ?

I love its slowness, its resistance, its element of unpredictability. Oil pastel truly never dries, which makes my works both alive, fragile and wild at the same time. We can’t really know how they will age. They exist in the present. And it’s also a material I work with my fingers, almost like clay. There’s something sculptural in this direct relationship with the surface, I shape more than I draw.

Les pieds sur le canapé - drawing - 38x28cm

Your works often depict very realistic, almost familiar scenes of life, as if we had already experienced them. How do you choose the moments you decide to paint ?

I often start from a gesture, a posture, a suspended moment. These are very ordinary scenes, drawn from my immediate surroundings : a light, an angle, a body waiting. Sometimes, these images also come from my virtual daily life: an unremarkable photo glimpsed on social media, an image we normally scroll past without paying attention. I like to extract these fragments, offer them time again, density, a poetic reading. It’s a way to slow down the flow, to turn a fleeting instant into something suspended. I’m less interested in telling a story than in capturing this vibration of the real, somewhere between the familiar and the strange.

Color plays a very strong role in your work. How do you choose your palette? Is it instinctive or more considered ?

For me, color is first and foremost a sensation rather than a choice. It comes instinctively, often before the subject itself. I often say that my vision feels altered, because I perceive shapes and fields of color before I even understand the volumes and the space around me. I try to find a tension, a vibration between tones rather than a calm harmony. I work a lot from visual memories : light that’s too warm, saturated air, a hue that lingers on the retina. Sometimes a single color is enough to spark an image. It lets me build an atmosphere before I even know what I’m going to depict. Only then does the subject arrive, and its meaning.

Are there artists, movements or other forms of art that particularly inspire you ?

I feel very close to contemporary painting, to its sensitive, embodied dimension. My works are sculpted drawings that often resemble paintings, I search for that density, that physical presence of color. Matisse inspires me in a more classic way, for his ability to let flat color breathe, to give it full autonomy. His work feels incredibly contemporary to me. In Claire Tabouret’s art, I love that ghostly tension, that suspension of bodies between strength and fragility. But my influences go beyond painting : I love artists like Nan Goldin for her gaze on intimacy. In Camus or William Carlos Williams, I find a similar poetry of the everyday, that attention to the discreet beauty of simple things that I’m especially fond of. Sofia Coppola and Martin McDonagh often surprise me with their ability to reveal emotion in what we no longer look at. And then there’s Jarmusch, for his slowness, his quiet humor, his way of placing poetry in silence.

What does a day of creation look like for you ? Do you have rituals, habits or a particular rhythm in your process ?

There isn’t really a ritual, but an intuitive rhythm. I work on one piece at a time, to stay focused on the moment I want to capture. I return to it often early in the morning, at night, at different times of the day, as if each light shifted the meaning of the gesture a little. I spend a lot of time looking, letting things come. Sometimes a whole day comes down to a single gesture, a nuance found. It’s a very focused moment, both calm and energetic. Everything happens in a kind of inhabited silence, accompanied by vinyl records and old audio cassettes, like an inner soundtrack. Music is very important to me in the creative process.

Bleu lin / Camille Influence / La chambre du Lac Majeur

Among all your works, is there one you feel particularly attached to ? Why this one ?

There are several pieces I remain attached to, for different reasons. La chambre rose, for instance, which shows a couple under a too-harsh, almost awkward light in a pink bedroom with minimal, vintage décor. It moves me because it condenses many things I seek: that tension between fragility and strength, between softness and unease. It still feels alive, as if it were breathing, sighing on its own. And then there is Le regard, one of my first drawings. I made it after crossing paths, on a train, with the gaze of a young woman, both sensual and mysterious. That moment unsettled me, and it still does every time I look at the drawing. It’s a simple image, but for me it retains something elusive.

La chambre Rose / Le regard

Finally, do you have upcoming projects, an exhibition, a new series or a collaboration in progress ?

I’m preparing a group exhibition at the Galerie Signal in Crest, in the south of France, at the end of November. The theme revolves around hibernation and rituals. I’ll be presenting pieces inspired by our small daily rituals, those tiny gestures that ground us, reassure us, sometimes without us even realizing. Poetic rituals, almost imperceptible ones, but which say a lot about the way we inhabit the world.

Coffee and cigarettes - Drawing - 38x28cm / Retour des courses - Drawing - 29x38cm / Fleur d'automne - Drawing - 38x28cm

To discover more of Gaël Caron’s works, visit his website https://gaecaron.myportfolio.com/work and follow his latest updates on Instagram gael.oil.