Born in 1990 in Evry-Courcouronnes, Manuel Pougès has been living and working in Bordeaux since 2016. Drawing has always been a part of his life since he used it to kill time in the classrooms, not being part of the pack of Alpha students. The caricatures and saucy scenes he made, whose protagonists were no more than 10 metres away from him, were his first training in drawing.
Manuel Pougès continued this self-taught training until the day he left to study art in Belgium. This was a godsend, as he was beginning to run out of new models to satisfy his creativity.
He thus went through two phases of learning: illustration in St-Luc in Belgium, which was very useful in teaching graphic techniques, and then the Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, thanks to which he developed a more conceptual art and a more serious approach.
Manuel Pougès is now inspired by the possibilities of the invisible universes and their macroscopic details, with the aim of rendering without scale. He offers an imaginary form to this infinity of possibilities. He explores the notion of geometric purity through the circle, which concentrates each motif in a fractal world.
"I think that repetition can sublimate a simple motif and bring an aesthetic, unusual and hypnotic dimension to it. When I start a new design I first look for a pattern. Then I try to imagine the final form that the accumulation of this pattern will create, its final appearance. Once seduced, I can begin to draw; an automatism gradually takes place. I try to ape the Machine, but my human nature will inevitably create imperfections. This is what I call natural geometry." - Manuel Pougès
This young artist is not anchored in a fixed approach, although the method is obsessive, aesthetic research takes precedence over reasoning. Manuel Pougès brings his own explanations to his works, but remains for free interpretation. The resulting chimera can inspire more or less blurred sensations of déjà vu. The evocative power remains important to him.
