I have now been painting for more than fifteen years…

Every day…

I started discovering the sensual pleasure in the act of painting.

After studying political science

and being an entrepreneur in the communication industry, the discovery of painting appeared to me past thirty years old like a revelation, like a magical moment.

Swallowed up by this magic, I decided to abandon everything and to devote myself to it.

I left Paris for the remote countryside where I started painting.

I learned on my own, letting my sensibility express itself, without asking questions.

Movement proves itself by walking; maybe painting would prove itself by painting.

This training lasted the time I needed to become a painter.

How to define my work?

Firstly, I consider it as a real hard work. I have never done anything quickly.

Everything requires time, energy, precision and technique.

I know that this notion is not a value but the first word that comes to me to define my work is: my work… is a

well-achieved work!

Then, I want to produce something which is beautiful before being meaningful, even if we can obviously say or hope that beauty is meaningful. Of course, this is subjective, but I think that if you don’t care about it, beauty is not going to emerge by itself.

Beauty is for me like a shiver which affects us and makes us sensitive.

In a time, which tries to make us believe, that to understand is more important than to love, I’d like to think that sensitivity could still win. 

So, rather than to try to express a world which does not need  me for that, I try to open ways to escape.

Naturally  abstract, my approach is in fact " abstractive " in the sense that his objective is not the subject but the spectator of the subject and his dream is to abstract him from everything …

Obviously, if we stopped ourselves here, we could say, at best, that we got a “beautiful work”.

However, I never intended to produce a work that is only and solely ornamental.

In this sense, my collaboration with Knoll consisted in considering the Tulip armchairs by Saarinen as a proper medium, to make it something between sculpture and painting, between design and art.

This approach has now a new side to it as it is developing on a medium which is completely mine and opens new possibilities of which I can’t see the limits yet.

Liberated from the constraints of a canvas, I can define my own formats and sizes and consider space in a new way, from the walls to the ceiling.

The ceiling is for me an important element which I want to deal with.

Firstly, it’s a blank space people don’t care about.

It forces us to (up) lift our heads in order to look at it.

Also, it enables

me to display my new forms, for which I am still looking for a name, between

sculptures and mobiles.

This medium also frees me on the canvas. The deformations I apply on it

create waves, as if the planet climate change was producing its first effects. Between

painting and sculpture, these waves spread, increased by the mirror I paint on.

Reflection is part of my work, bringing a real part of magic to it. Surprise is always

there: changing lights modify colours and shapes; the smallest movement is always

echoed.

Reflection is like a metaphor of Godard's comment saying that reflection had become

the “world first power”. We end up not being able to tell the original from its distorted

echo as confusion settles.

But it is a harmonious confusion of which the lines, always moving, create changing

landscapes. This is the object of my intervention: to draw the lines that structure

space, and then let go. Magic operates. Creation reflects on its own, silence

 

 

Bruno Schiepan - 2009