Fabien Delaube

Biography: Both a specialized decorator - trained at the Bordeaux Opera House - and a painter, Fabien was first introduced to audiovisual techniques, and more particularly to photography, before later turning to a rich and varied apprenticeship in the plastic arts. Exercised in the mastery of all pictorial skills - from classical painting to trompe l'oeil - his personal art is revealed in the execution of an original figurative contemporary painting, imbued with a dreamlike quality. Working with mixed techniques applied to canvas, his preference is for oil painting, which he likes to use to perfect the finish of all his works. Fabien likes to paint closed, almost inexpressive faces, whose more or less discernible human body features are reminiscent of forms inspired by African masks or other facies borrowed from theatre or military history. Always depicted from the front, these characters, of uncertain ages but with a gendered physiognomy, seem to come straight out of a legendary tale whose history could be pierced by deciphering the "scars" of colours and materials with which their faces are partially or even entirely covered. The oil used by the artist as the final medium for the realization of the work, accentuates this almost sacred, precious feeling that seems to emerge from the subject represented. Fragments of individuals imbued with a poetry as timeless as it is fantastic, Fabien's works plunge us into a "mirror-like" contemplation in which we can ask ourselves, of the two, who is staring at the other? Artistic approach: oil painting