Stephan Balleux

Born 1974, Belgium

 
Stephan Balleux’s paintings, 3D videos, drawings and sculptures explore issues of pictorial perception and the conceptual idea of painting. The artist is engaged on an exploration of painting’s identity and the place it holds in the current artistic production challenged by digital and virtual technologies. Far from denigrating or reacting against these new media, the painter employs all available tools, old and new, in order to endlessly question the pictorial medium.

 

In his latest body of work the investigation on painting’s identity is carried out by a return to the medium itself. He places fractioned characters within figurative scenes causing like this a feeling of anxiety in a strange and disturbing space. Painting’s substance takes on human form, becomes an object or diffuses itself in the landscape. By doing so, the artist wishes to give to painting its own identity, to acknowledge its organic essence in constant metamorphosis.



Stephan Balleux, The Temple's Faces, 200 x 150 cm, oil on painting, 2008.