I’ve been inspired by the organically surreal artwork of painter Stephan Balleux since I first stumbled upon it. He’s updated his website with more comprehensive views of his aggressive and ambitious art exhibitions. It’s all very worth a highly inspirational browse.
The art of Stephan Balleux really knocked the wind out of me. It’s completely original and totally amazing. He also likes to focus on a subject I have been obsessed with in the past, skulls. In the heart of every rock n’ roller there lies a skull.
Balleux’s work goes way beyond the subject matter and dives into the conceptual. Here is the artist in his own words from his website, “At present, my work investigates the closeness of the ‘antique’ form of representation – painting – and the ‘up-to-date’ forms of image production – 3D virtual images and computer-manipulated images. Despite of the different ways of working and of their opposition in terms of what is animated and inanimate, visual as well as conceptual connections exist: the figural painting process and virtual images share a same approach of creation which depends on a re-conception of reality “by way of the hand” (by opposition to the historical basis of photography which rely on the mechanical recording of reality, showing “what was”), they are both the coating of a texture on a surface (on pigmentary and material, the other completely virtual and mathematical).
Paradoxically, my work consists in confronting these two modes of image production in close spaces and open a field of perception located at the border of each medium. The relation to the spectator/visitor is established both in a contradictory and pertinent movement, by the contrast between the effects induced by the video – a definite and fixed (almost totalitarian) movement, and painting, an immobility which offers to those who watch their own time of perception.”
He is no doubt someone who will continue to evolve and amaze. So keep a close eye on his work and development because he will no doubt be surfacing again in any number of art publications and websites.
