Flog

Human of Glass

Flog is the working name of Florian Gaborit, a French artist born in 1984 in Cholet. He drew from early childhood, studied graphic design at the Pivaut school in Nantes and made illustration his profession, moving between commercial illustration and publishing before committing to his own work. That training shows. His pictures are built with the precision of a designer: the gesture is controlled, the detail is deliberate, and the composition is resolved before the paint goes down.

His subject is a single invented figure, the Human of Glass. The body is transparent, an empty and fragile shell, and inside it colour moves in waves. The glass stands for the physical and emotional fragility of a person, the plain fact that anyone can break. The colour stands for everything the shell contains: emotions, knowledge, memories, experiences and values, the accumulation that makes one person unlike another. Set at first against flat grey backgrounds that stood for how hard the world can be, the figure read as a small bright life inside a cold room.

An expanding universe

What began as one character on grey has grown into a much larger and far more colourful world. Flog moves his figure through situations and poses that are by turns tender, dreamlike, sarcastic and occasionally unsettling, and he treats the context of a scene as being every bit as important as the subject standing in it. References to childhood and to pop culture recur throughout. The pictures carry no captions and resolve no stories, which is deliberate: the viewer is left to assemble the narrative from their own sensibility, and to recognise themselves in a figure that has neither a face nor a biography.

Technically he works in mixed media, combining aerosol spray, acrylic and oil on canvas. It is this combination of a street derived vocabulary with classical handling that distinguishes the work from either tradition taken on its own.

Editions

Flog issues limited edition prints alongside his unique canvases, and these are how most collectors first acquire him. New Horizon is a screen print in twenty three colours on heavy Somerset fine art paper, in an edition of eighty eight, hand signed in pencil and embossed by the publisher. Happy Meal is a smaller square print on archival cotton rag paper in an edition of fifty, signed and numbered. Flower is Life belongs to the same group of releases. These are substantial objects rather than posters, and the colour separation work in particular is ambitious for an artist at this stage of a career.

Exhibitions and market

He has exhibited across Europe, in the United States and in Asia, building an international base of collectors, and has shown with Dorothy Circus Gallery, which presented his first solo exhibition in the United Kingdom.

At LLB Auction in Luxembourg his appearances have been confined to prints, and the results are mixed. Two of the three lots offered have sold, one comfortably inside its estimate range and one at the very bottom of it. With so few results the auction record should be treated as indicative only. His primary market remains the gallery and the print release, where demand has been described as growing steadily since the Human of Glass character first appeared.