Stephane CALAIS
Born in 1967, Stéphane Calais is a French artist based in Paris. After studying at the Beaux-Arts in Nîmes and then at the Institut des Hautes Études en Arts Plastiques in Paris, he was nominated in 2008 for the Fondation Entreprise Ricard Prize and in 2009 for the Marcel Duchamp Prize.
The drawing is at the heart of Stéphane Calais’s painting practice; a gestural style honed and maintained daily through the practice of sketching from life. He then transcribes these observations. Reality is encoded in a language composed of often abstract onomatopoeia. These give rhythm to colorful atmospheres where it is unclear whether they are planes, voids, or sensations.
The flowers are one of Stéphane Calais’s favorite motifs. He is determined to break them down and reassemble them. For him, the flower is a cultural minimum shared by all ; something whose aesthetic value everyone agrees upon. In art history, flowers have alternately served as symbolic motifs, vanities, decorative ornaments, and gestural abstractions ; all at once an overwhelming artistic heritage and the almost instinctive response that arises within everyone, artist or not.
Yet Stéphane Calais composes with a light touch. It must be said that he has become a master in the art of appropriation and reinterpretation,he who juggles references and mimics the hierarchies of taste. In this series, the vertical formatevokes 18th-century decorative paintingcentury. The compositions are punctuated by abrupt chromatic shifts, moving from faded tones to acid-hued shades, from organic freshness to artificial bouquet. The black ink highlights are ambiguous. They reveal the curiosity of an artist who draws as much from Asian calligraphy as from the marginal ramblings of an André Franquin.
His work is included in various private collections in France, the United States, Belgium, and Japan, as well as in several museums, including the Centre Pompidou and the MAC VAL. He also works intermittently as an exhibition curator and art critic. He has been teaching at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam since 2008 and at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris since 2019.
