Blair Ekleberry

American-born visual artist Blair Ekleberry, who graduated from the Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2024, began his career as an architect before devoting himself to a multidisciplinary artistic practice, ranging from drawing to sculpture.

Pencil in hand, he began sketching in the Boston subway, then in the bustling streets of Paris, the city he chose as his new home. He caricatures the expressions or reproduces them from memory, distorting the faces he then reintegrates into his hyperrealistic hyperrealistic creations.

His free, colorful work reacts to the minimalist, uncluttered architecture that influenced his training. Yet it is not free of architectural references: inspired by the grotesque grotesques of Romanesque capitals and Byzantine bas-reliefsinspired by the grotesques of Romanesque capitals and Byzantine bas-reliefs, he constrains his figures within frames or distorts them through perspective effects borrowed from the Middle Ages.

His sculpture entitled Tour de Bla-Blaan accumulation of carelessly overlapping clay heads, reflects the characteristic hubbub of the capital's streets. This tower of Babel contemporary evokes both a spatial claustrophobia and a social disconnection, where proximity disturbs.

Blair Ekleberry plays with references to produce ironic and humorous works, highlighting the absurd at the heart of our noisy and impatient society.absurdity at the heart of our noisy, impatient societywhere omnipresent communication loses its authenticity.