Peltier Stéphane

Born in 1967 in Rouen, Stéphane Peltier lives and works in Toulouse and in the Gers (south-west of France). He graduated from the Art School of Aix en Provence University and undertook a PHD on the beginnings of Art Criticism.

He trained during the period of the “return to painting”at the end of the 1980s and remained faithful to that medium. He had been marked since his beginnings by American abstract expressionism and in the years 2000 he came back to fragmented figuration with works inhabited by acephalic or phantomatic / ghostly bodies, animals and references to Antiquity. Then he stopped painting.  He left metropolitan France to travel. When he went back to painting the ghosts / phantoms had disappeared.
His interests are very diverse and range from Italian Mannerism to Oscar Wilde’s writings and portolan charts. His work nowadays takes a number of forms that can hardly be traced back to a common identity. Still, the common denominator is his conception of painting: convinced as he is that art is totally separate from life, he considers art as pure artifice. To him, a painting is an enclosed world in which outlook, meaning and sensation are carefully built.
He is distrustful of the widespread use of photography in painting and only rarely resorts to it because it conceals the real as well as the painting underneath the surface of an image. Conversely, his work feeds on memory, observation, drawing and the remains of sensations which underlie his relationship to the world.