France

Stephan Balleux

Stephan Balleux is a pluridisciplinary artist ; he is indeed an extraordinary painter  but also a sculptor, as well as a videos or performances author. He is the child of a century during which collecting images was the inaugural act of creation. Thus, though he is a painter, he began doubting about painting, following the example of Marcel Duchamp and later of serial approaches of Pop art and conceptual art.  He is painting from the collection of images already existing and differs painting itself by collecting. Then his ambition as a painter is entirely dedicated to de-featuring. But such an ambition does not only consist in destruction or in a common devastation due to some bad painting ; there is indeed some kind of paradox in the means used by Stephan Balleux to de-feature. He de-features by being a master of featuring. The symbol of this paradox relies in this strange paint magma, savagely brushed aside as well as meticulously detailed in every single fold or wave and which the artist calls « blob » and which symbolizes his whole production of painted images.

In many artworks, this artificial form seems to benefit from the same weightlessness as the one of a cloud : a hanging and pending form which questions banal images in order to reveal a new signification. On the other side, when it is invasive, attacking on monuments or human activities, it invades the faces and seems to recover it all. This is the case for this series of portraits that we are showing, i.e. women?s faces, whether seductive women or mothers ? some of them coming from our collective imagination and which seem to be battling with their rough futures, i.e. a kind of future perfect.

This is precisely this confusion, this impossibility to decide on human beings and their identities, which extends to the material itself and which might well be at the root of Stephan Balleux?s work. The confusion centers around and mainly expresses itself through the idea of fuzziness as a process but also in terms of reception : « No image can escape from fuzziness, neither can any sound escape from scattering. Reality itself is web of vagueness. Fuzziness never stops questioning both our perception and our representation of the world and reactivating them as if it was concealing or telling a promise of clearness, knowledge, beauty, something beyond confusion ? Fuzziness is a prerequisite in our relationship to the world and to artworks ». It is about identity confusion, confusion of the material through deterritorialisations and its disguises but also about the artist questioning himself. Indeed, beyond the diversified and disturbing nature of the suggested artworks, Stephan Balleux?s work quickly strikes by the coherence as well as by the pertinence of his questioning. He really asks himself about identity and painting?s place in a digital and virtual age.

Extract from a text of Dominique Païni called Painting and its double, ed. Ixelles Museum, Brussels, Belgium.

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