Steve Drevet is a self-taught photographer, painter, writer and teacher. After studying anthropology and psychology, he spent several years in the West Indies, mainly on the island of Marie Galante. A small island where he rubbed shoulders with the Quimbois (West Indian voodoo), which had a profound influence on his universe.
The hypnagogy (or hypnagogic state) that he practices since his youngest age, feeds his artistic approach, his literary and photographic experiments. Between dream and conscious state, it is a question of letting emerge visions, images coming from the depths of the spirit or from the contact, sometimes strange, with nature.
His first photographic experiences were born from his encounter with the visual artist Claude Parent-Saura and the primitive art of the Americas (Navajo, Hopi, Zuni, Huary, Chimu, Chancay). They collaborate on several exhibitions and catalogs for museums and foundations: Allauch Museum, Desnoyers Foundation, Céret Heritage House...
In 2013, they are working on L'île des chamans, a photographic narrative that will be presented for the first time at the Visa pour l'image festival in Perpignan and at the Collège de France in anthropology of art. A digital version of the book the island of shamans, written by Steve Drevet, will be published in spring 2023.
The year 2016 saw the birth of L'instant indécis in collaboration with the painter Romaric Mandelblat. The history of art and painting are invited in compositions centered around the still life. This work, consecrated by numerous private and museum exhibitions (Terrus Museum, Museum of the Master of Cabestany) and regular publications in the magazine Terres Catalanes, is interested in the viewer's gaze, in its "educated" grammar of the eye and seeks the confusion between painting and photography.
The Creatures series is a posthumanist offshoot. Psychoanalysis, Japanese theater (bunraku and kabuki), shamanism and the history of painting are the main inspirations.
In 2022, he returned to the hypnagogic experiments he began as a child with the Hypnagogia project, which combines watercolor, digital art and gold panning. The images first created in nature with watercolors, on the banks of rivers, are then reworked on computer and printed on Japanese handmade paper (washi). On each work, he glues a gold flake found in one of the rivers he keeps exploring.
