ANTIFER II - Sosthène BARAN

ANTIFER

Sosthène Baran studied for ten years before entering the School of Fine Arts in Caen (Esam), ten years during which he trained in cooking, decorative painting, engraving, publishing (at the École Duperré) and finally graphic design (at the EPSAA, Ivry).

It is perhaps this atypical background that makes Sosthène's work, too, atypical. Graduated in 2020, the health context did not give him the chance to hang his work in what is very often the first solo exhibition of a young artist.

Sosthene's works are powerful, strange, timeless. The desire to see them reunited in a monographic exhibition provoked his invitation.

Solo exhibition of Sosthene Baran at the Academy

from February 26 to April 24, 2022

SHED/L'Académie - Centre d'art contemporain de Normandie

EXHIBITIONAdmission free every day from 2pm to 6pm and on request.

Address: 96 rue des Martyrs de la Résistance - 76150 Maromme

In its support to contemporary creation, SEQUANA is pleased to renew its collaboration with SHED by bringing its expertise for the promotion of artists within the framework of its auction activity.

DELIVERY OF WORKS => at the end of the exhibition (from April 26, 2022)

Young in his career, Sosthene Baran graduated only two years ago and yet. When one looks at his works one finds oneself intrigued, not to say subjugated by the plastic qualities of his practice. Like a 15th century painting, there is certainly the importance of the subject represented, but above all there is the demonstration of a mastered technique.

This technique, or rather these techniques, the artist has acquired them through different trades that he has practiced in recent years. As a decorative painter for ten years, he has learned the use of effect, texture, trompe-l'oeil and faking applied to pictorial decorations.

If the artist is both a painter and a sculptor, it is his paintings that we have chosen to highlight in this exhibition. But don't worry, visitors will not be left out. His two practices are so little dissociable that one will find in his paintings an ornamentation which brings back to the sculpture; in the framing, the addition of elements in relief, but also the representation which he makes of his subjects. Indeed, the artist sometimes scans or models sculptures he has produced in order to include them in the design of his next painting. A technique that provides a singular materiality to the figures represented and participates in the foundation of his phantasmagorical imagination.

But how does he proceed? His paintings are born from the search for matter and form, from a "desire to do" that takes the subject as a pretext. The finished work will be finished once this desire to do evaporates, like a soul that no longer has a place here, will seek another body to settle in. The artist, guided by this invisible force, will then seek his new appearance by starting a new process. When he begins a piece, it often starts with a sketch, a 3D model or with a ball of clay. Then follow rituals, repetitions, gestures generating actions and also moments of gestation. A process of going back and forth that is reflected in the aesthetic quality of his work by the interweaving of images and techniques sketching a new world.

Creator of set pieces, the first solo exhibition of the artist could be read as a play. But what would it tell?

Fascinated by anthropos, childhood, the root of man, woman, love, death and their spiritual representations, it is in science fiction and Judeo-Christian imagery that Sosthene Baran draws his greatest inspiration. In search of another reality, "an imaginary alternative", he questions the identities and representations of these two "currents" to bring out hybrid characters. Surrounded by these figures with a blurred and anonymous character, the spectator has only to let himself be guided by his own dreams and fantasies.

His works, whose energy is palpable, transmit a perpetual movement, present or future metamorphoses, a permanent shift that leads to realize, take into consideration the sensations that provoke in us, these diffuse images.

Like his productions, Sosthène's reflections and inspirations are so multiple that they form a succession of layers