SfB are the initials of Stéphane franck Berthelot, born in La Rochelle in 1973. His academic (business school) and professional career (music publisher, communications director of a major media group) took him to Paris where he lives and works. His decision to devote himself to creation is a recent one. However, his artistic production is of great density and his works are now present in several countries: Sweden, Switzerland, Russia, Portugal, Australia and France where he exhibits in Paris and at the Paul Bert flea market in St-Ouen. One of his works "Neons" even appears today in the Salon de la Cartographie at the Elysée Palace. His work mixes several techniques (digital, photographic and graphic) and leaves a large place to colour elements that draw an often abstract universe where his personal geometry expresses a kind of poetic and vibrant imbalance.
He works on the play of light and colour in which the eye gets lost, blurred, tries to settle. The technique itself disappears - pencil, ink and pastel on paper or digital brush on a tablet then edited as a single copy on photographic art paper with pigmentary inks - it is never easy to perceive in which form and by which way the finished work appears to the eye. Its light is not that of a figurative artist, its warm forms pierce the canvas as if they were engulfed in the embrace of a torn curtain.
Whether it is his "neon" series, at the same time "digital and musical" (a great artist and precursor of electronic music says so) that allows him to exercise figures of new colours that seem to live as if in the centre of a flame, or works whose pure abstraction offers us a path, they seem to come from an old dream awakened by a brand new technicality.
His suspended figures, like footprints fixed to troubling backgrounds, vibrate like chimeras where the spectre of fainting weighs like a fear.
Attentive and passionate about modernity, he is obsessed with fleeing from a past where everything is a foregone conclusion, made of abandonment and oblivion. He risks finding a way out in an intimate labyrinth where nothing ever fades away but where everything can be renewed. A quest for light and dazzle.
The labyrinthine succession of these periods of creation shows his refusal to let himself be enclosed even by his own references. The Form, omnipresent signature of origin, becomes a dragon to fight. Tomorrow must remain a blank canvas.
His work is then constituted like a puzzle without a model, of which we sense that there will be no final piece. SfB never stops offering new and modern visions of a fragile and sometimes inhuman contemporary world.
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