Focused on human condition, Theo Appel’s canvases let spring out, on an extra-large scale, the man who runs and seeks, screaming, the meaning of his life. Thousands of small and repeated oil-painted features unflatten plain surfaces and make the figures - sculpted by light effects - fragile. They cannot escape the vulnerability of their human being. The colours - some of which are vitaminized to encapsule energy - are very precisely selected and laid down one next to the other, in a graphic design-like style. Visitors cannot forget the figurative art of Theo Appel. From a distance or close up, each painting seems to be brought to relief and to take life. Memory is persistent once back in the street: are fragments of dismantled bodies erupted from a film of Woody Allen following us ?
The painting of Berhiss is woven by a complex knotting made of poesy, meticulousness, candour and lucidity. As if the unbelievable power of imagination of a former peasant, elementary grower of the ground, had found an ideal spot, a kind of promised land, in artistic practice. Canvas, wood, ceramic... the surface is covered with dots and lines in an endless repetition, bringing a very subtle poesy and a fantastic world that has neither top or bottom, no left or right.Fantasmagorial bestiary, zoomorphic shapes or vegetal waves that dwell in the artist's mind and fill his works, seem to be dancing freely, but in perfectly mastered movement that harmonizes their world.)
As behind a mature seed which denys the winter soil, the fear before the birth and the thrill of surviving and providing again to what is needed, each work of Laurent Chabolle is a tremor under death cover. Life is represented by waste - metal, plastic, wood..., materials the artist confronts himself with, like a farmer with natural elements. Laurent Chabolle more particularily utilizes used corrugated iron, that he first paints and then leaves outside in his garden for oxidizing until revealing memory and fragility... before cutting, sticking and solding it. The material is solid, but seems much more fragile than a painting, like landscapes divided in fragments. Contrast between rough material and extreme delicate painter’s and sculptor’s work produces very sensitive pieces combining tenderness with poesy.
Pedro Castrortega was born in 1956 and currently lives and works in Madrid. He has received several international awards, participated in several important fairs and had a great number of exhibitions all other the world.
One can easily recognize the spanish artist’s cosmology, with its human, animal or flower figures, that defy gravitation, float in the paper’s or canvas’s space, and join together in silent and fantastic visions. With soft strokes like a caress -most often, but also now and them with humour, his poetic paintings or drawings are a humanist reflexion about our responsability towards nature, with which the artist has a close relationship.
Far from academic traditions, with sometimes nearly exotic outlines or a japanese manner, and a palette of colours that recalls major works of the painting masters, always persitent in our collective memory, Alexis Fraikin offers us an elegant intimate art, shaped in a very distinctive poetry.
With the delicacy of nostalgic shades, refined colours and forms laid side by side, and very subtil transparency effects, Fraikin's still life paintings appear as landscapes that lead to mere contemplation.
“Mimouni dreamt himself as an archaeologist, he became a painter”. By looking closely at the artist’s work, you wonder if he had not only made a slight turn since his pictures seem to search for “elsewhere” or “invisible”. Every curv is a meditation, the least stroke a quest for ecstatic elevation that shall get closer to heaven. Such symbols as ladders, circles, firewood, pirogues fill his paintings towards undefined landscapes opening on the observer's dream. Lightness is amazing, subtle light comes from the sky, colours vibrate mysteriously... Painting, collages and materials combine on paper or canvas to structure a finely chiseled space. Somptuous gesture, remarquable energy, musical tempo... creativity seems endless and the memory of oriental calligraphy persistent.
From an exhibition to the other, from a painting to the next, public is always fascinated by the highly talented science to portraiture of Michele Pilhan. Beyond a very personnal use of swathes of colours and a deeply modern approach, the painter remarquebly fixes sitters' expressions, features, their silence as if it was about to be broken. Man and his superposed layers of truth, his solitude desert, his hopes vanity, his questioning anxiety: the inner life of characters, their soul and their presence have a rare strenght.
All these penetrating stares touch you in an unforgettable way.
With russian and belgian origins, Françoise Schein settled her studio in Paris after making her first cartographic installation on a Manhattan - NY sidewalk. As a sculptor, cartographer, architect, city planner, humanist campaigner, Françoise Schein is a extraordinary and unusual artist.
Exhibited in many prestigious museums, a retrospective exhibition that begun in Brussels - International Center for Urbanism, Architecture and Landscape museum (CIVA) in Brussels consacrates her extra-large and permanent urban installations, and particularly her metro stations dedicated to Human Rights (Paris, Stockholm, Brussels, Lisbon, Berlin, Rio…) she is acknowledged worldwide for.
Putting the humanistic and educational commitments ahead of artist’s ego, she has introduced unique participative artistic actions with the people of brazilians favelas or of suburbs in Europe. The Luz metro station she is building with 17 favelas schools in the center of Sao Paulo megalopolis already belongs to history.
