Trained in the 1980s, at the time of the "return to painting", Stéphane Peltier remained faithful to this medium, even if he also practices other media, including video and documentary filmmaking. Initially not very concerned about promoting his work, he never stopped painting, and travelled, spending several years in the Indian Ocean. Back in France, nourished by these experiences and the otherness of the worlds he has lived in, his painting is organized in series that all consider these simple questions: what is a place? what is wandering and the imagination that inhabits the one who leaves? the one who returns? To this end, he plunges into Oscar Wilde’s literary imagination as well as into the study of medieval portulans or the decoration of classical painting. He builds a painting that oscillates between welcoming decorative seduction and the anxiety of a world that seems to leave you on the margins, on the threshold. Somewhere, he says, "between Paul and Virginia and Little Thumb".
