Jean Louis AVRIL (F) – Michel BENARD (F) – Dominique CHAPELLE (F) – Vittorio CRACAS (I) – Charles LESCUYER (F) – Antonio MALMO (I) – Jules de SAINT-AUBIN (UK) – Marie Thérèse TAVEL DE RAVET (F) – Gaëlle TOUTOUS (F) – Thérèse TRANNOY- LE BRUN (F).
From the first glance, we are immersed in a staggering reality. Color plays with light and materials with disconcerting fluidity. Experiences, signs of a fleshy practice and a certain technical mastery, mingle with discoveries, seeds of new creations.
The presence of the works of Stephtout imposes itself on us; it grabs us, takes us over the mixed lines… A chaos? An inextricable tangle? A fertile humus certainly, from which emerges a silent beauty and a vital breath. We can feel it as a soft vibration, almost tingling at the back of the skull…
Let yourself be transported by this intoxicating excitement that touches the very essence of everyone’s dignity, with joy and simplicity.
Happiness.
Because it is a question of rebuilding, of reforming a whole, a unity. To be a whole puzzle with a thousand pieces put together. On this itinerary of perpetual research and astonishment, with the artist, we move forward, we explore possibilities that are unknown, ignored or even repressed, denied.
Is it self-recognition? A novelty? A genesis?
The words Living and Being vibrate in unison and reveal to us a horizon of unsuspected depth, paradoxically seemingly endless. We then reach a buried desire for eternity. So distant…
And it is appeasement that suddenly welcomes us.
The moment of the meeting has turned into the present, forever.
At the bottom of the canvases offered to our eyes, we perceive little by little, very slowly, the emptiness inscribed within us. Not the void synonymous with nothingness, no. The emptiness that gives birth to meaning, the white between the black arabesques of a writing where the secret realization of our childhood dreams would nestle.
We thought we knew, and we rediscover the wonder of learning.
This is what is given to us by the work of Stephtout, who shares with us the graceful quivering of his very interior and burning light.
– Gaëlle Toutous
Poet
Stephtout“I” of shadow and light: studio trips
A digest of humanity, combining movement, light, darkness, structure, evanescence, materials, transparencies, abstracts, figurative bursts… abundance and purity… exuberance and emptiness… yes, a digest in suspension, whose pearls of dew we savor…[Gaëlle Toutous]
When I arrived at Stephtout, I did not expect to find the whole floor requisitioned permanently and arranged, over the rooms, in successive spaces where according to the impulse, her state of being, she can separately approach the engraving , sculpture, painting, collage, charcoal, photography… A set that brings together a diversity of disciplines that is matched only by the variety of subjects and the freedom of its creation.
They look like satellites orbiting in the same system. His art is part of the Stephtout galaxy! A microcosm that gives pride of place to the “I” of his mythology as an artist.
This universe is the lair of an action painting, instinctive and always tinged with emotion. An investigative panorama where the border does not exist between abstract compositions and figurative effects of colors and their vibrations. A representative creation of a spontaneous, daring, passionate artist. This is obviously the key to this approach and also sometimes its Achilles heel vis-à-vis certain galleries which require, in the name of artistic coherence, a unique creative line, an inspiration or a systematic style.
Above all, Stephtout feels, smells the subject that is proposed: “it is an action without tension where the degrees of creativity are generated without any thought or prior effort”.
A celebration always where the colors scatter under the brush, the knife, the roller and the fingers in the chromatic brilliance, the fire of the senses and each time a prodigious pictorial renaissance.
His approach is sincere, assured, his work as authentic as it is unclassifiable but always equal in scope. If Stephtout is a real free electron in this artistic biotope, with an undeniable talent and all the questions of a child’s soul, she offers us the colors of magnificent answers.
– Jean-Louis AVRIL
Univers des Arts , July-August 2010 n° 153
A pictorial identity in fractals
Paintings by Stephtout, Text by Charles Lescuyer
Go there by immersion, in auditory and syntactic apnea, to dive into the depths of shapes and colors, taking care to admire, vibrations and vertigo, this illuminated tingling “reflection” of our time…
And there, no more measurable time, the identity of the colors becomes multiple in the intoxication of the backgrounds of his canvases, and mixes in a constantly renewed harmony the oxygen of the surface, with the heat of the oven in the techniques used, and which with our defending eye, couples the breath by the unique beauty of each of its mirrors of the soul.
But if it was only about painting…and we are taken with happiness and delight in each incarnation of ourselves, which defying physical laws makes us hope unconsciously for the reality of the projection of Stephtout.
The mold is broken, definitively, and it’s a safe bet for all the techniques used, all the formats involved and all the colors enlisted, no “appearance” is comparable to a school, a genre, a style …indatable to carbon 14.
Gold, paper, brush, scissors, enamel materials… are one, one: she, Stephtout, it is therefore normal that such a unique and identical or similar sensitivity to herself also takes on this amazing shape.
And this trace left in a work is itself a humble, delicate way of signing without appropriation, the beauty of what surrounds us, anywhere, at any time, living diversity!
Speaking or writing about Stephtout’s painting, being “nothing but opening a parenthesis”, I close it with words of gratitude, since by spontaneity, the vision of his work, taken as much as a whole as by moving picture, by painting primer of reality, it gave me back the faculty to see and to embrace with the gaze. Attention, not a furtive kiss like a peck in the mop of hair, no! But an embrace with life that comes from the conflagration, from the fire of the senses to bring back to life what in each spectator, the more he is distant in his sensitivity, from the age of his childhood: the capacity to marvel.
– Charles Lescuyer
Philosopher
STEPHTOUT by Jules de SAINT-AUBIN
With Stephtout, we enter fully into a painting of action but also of emotions.
We are in the presence of an abstract work, even if here and there, a few nods to an attenuated figuration appear.
The colors burst in a powerful rhythm with a full and charged substance. With vivacity, the chromatic play reveals an exceptionally daring work in which any figurative effect is absorbed. First noticed by her colorist gifts, the quality of her constructions is not to be outdone.
The violent oppositions of reds, blacks, blues and yellows remind us of the work of Willem de Kooning in the 1950s;
The effects of materials, a bit like Jean Fautrier, are not akin to the desperate extension outside the canvas of Pollock’s “dripping” or even like Burry, the material is worked deeply in its most subtle nuances. , and one would believe to perceive the distant echo of the impressionist illuminations.
The space radiates impulsive colors that seem to spring from everywhere. The artist expresses himself with controlled enthusiasm, the spaces become “exciting” fields of investigation that Stephtout eagerly invades.
With “Composition rouge 1″ we discover squares of canvas on frames” placed, glued where the orange reds distribute the space in particularly successful games of shadow or light. “Affinity”, “Ocean”, “The sailor”, are not only evocative titles, but because of their well-structured flat areas and their colorimetric balance, evoke the work of Nicolas de Staël.
The creation remains in the image of the artist, spontaneous and daring.
Obviously, Stephtout offers us a work that carries a new current, which is undoubtedly inspired by works that we have been able to discover here and there, but which, remains with force and conviction, leads us on an original path. There is no shortage of arguments to be enthusiastic about and the artist has every reason to maintain this seductive freedom of interpretation.
Unpredictable and passionate, Stephtout is driven by an emotion that generates energy.
The artist questions himself and questions you, doubt leads to certainties, not without eliminating hesitations.
A work of remarkable quality which will soon find its rightful place on the international market and also a first-rate contribution to the history of Contemporary Art.
– Jules de Saint-Aubin
Art critic