Alexis Ralaivao was born in 1991 in Rennes, France, where he currently lives and works.


Ralaivao makes oil paintings built from scenes of everyday life - a draped shirt, a hand at rest, a glass on a table. His technique draws on 17th-century Dutch genre painting, especially Johannes Vermeer and Gerard ter Borch, and their attention to fabric and light. A self-taught artist, he draws on an ongoing, wide-ranging study of the history of painting, photography, antiques and French literature. His early paintings dwelt on the textures of the domestic interior, rendered in muted, near-monochrome tones. His more recent work turns instead to scenes of formalwear, fine dining and jewelry, using them to explore consumption and exclusion, increasingly in blocks of saturated, vibrant colour. Across both bodies of work, he builds his surfaces in thin, careful layers, using light to slow the image down and hold the viewer's attention on a single, ordinary gesture.


His work is held in the collections of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, United States; the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami, United States; the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Rennes, France; the Powerlong Museum, China; and the He Art Museum, China.