A painting of the plural singular...
"I is another...
said Rimbaud.
"Game, it is the others..."
could have answered Queneau.
"Hell, it is the others..."
said Sartre.
"The reverse, it is the ones..."
could have answered Pérec.
These are only a few aspects of Gaëtan de Séguin's painting...
Gaëtan de Séguin was born in 1971 in Montpellier into a family of five children. After an artistic education at the ESAG Penninghen, he did various jobs related to drawing before devoting himself fully to painting.
"I have always wanted two things: to live in a specific place and to "live" from my painting.
My first goal I reached in 2010, a house/workshop that I designed and built over a period of 10 years. A tense architecture, light and an immense view on a region that is an integral part of my life. In this place I can paint surrounded by my own people. I don't try to explain it to myself, it's like that, a certainty, the framework that suits me. This anchorage is essential to my work.
Since I was very young, I have been the one who paints "men". As soon as a support falls under my hand, I fill it with silhouettes; for 40 years I have been responsible for quite a bestiary! Each work session in my studio gives birth to a humanity populated by individuals who interact. My painting is clearly figurative, yet I leave it up to each person to invent the story of my characters. I do not want to lock the painting with an explanatory note.
A thread, at the most... Thus the demonstrations of January 2015. Suddenly I wanted to see my "people" gather and overflow from the canvas. Dense or sparse crowds, cheerful, dignified, silent or roaring, poignant etc... Individuals with a unique physique, the sum of their conviction tinting the group. This is what I am looking for through my series "J+...". I cover my canvas with a dominant color very dense, almost screaming. Then this undercoat is completely covered. The tone becomes clear again and the tints melt into a cameo of colored grays. From there I can start to paint by adding or subtracting material. The music that I listen to will then give rhythm to the appearance of the group. By scratching with the most diverse tools I paint as much as with brushes. Each asperity, each scratch is a unique motif that characterizes the individual as much as it allows him to melt into a much more global and abstract dimension." Gaëtan de Séguin
"Gaëtan de Séguin paints the crowd. This crowd is made up of a multitude of almost identical but all singular silhouettes. Beings that, through the action of the painting itself, become motifs. Recurrent, obsessive, swarming, reconstituting a new life, a new being.
Strange and uncommunicative, this silhouette sometimes escapes from the crowd but without finding its salvation there. Alone, crossing his fellow man without really being able to understand him...
When you know Gaëtan, this is surprising, he who loves words and conversation so much. Would his painting be his double in negative?
The multitude and the unique, the anonymous and the personal, the silence and the noise. There is all this in Gaëtan's painting, a painting of the plural singular."
François Supiot
