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Bob Ross painting
Antifer
Par désir, par hasard,
solo show at Galerie C, Paris.
From 25/01/2024 to 24/02/2024.
© Aurélien Mole
What do a chair and a chess game have in common?
A magnet and a spatula?
Can art be made by chance?
In his iconic work The Songs of Maldoror, Lautréamont defined, despite himself, Surrealism. It would thus be “as beautiful as the chance meeting on a dissecting table of a sewing machine and an umbrella.” This play of encounters also operates in the works of Sosthène Baran: it can be perceived in his very way of proceeding. Indeed, the artist gathers, associates, and reactivates objects in his pictorial work. By combining his paintings with objects, by making his works into objects and those objects into works, the artist deliberately allows the unconscious—his own, ours—to emerge.
From a piece of salvaged wood, coated and then painted, Sosthène Baran depicts a hatted head. At first glance, the composition seems taken from reality. Yet some elements fade away: the eyes, the mouth disappear or dissolve into the volume, and the texture of the wood takes over. The hat becomes a white, voluptuous, almost foamy flat surface, which even led one of the artist’s friends to say it looked like a pint—a beer—an object generally belonging to genre scenes in painting.
The artist plays with this ambiguity even in the title of the work, which he called “La Peinte”, emphasizing the formal confusion he provoked—and evoking the very act of painting itself. In this title, the pronoun moreover elevates the object to the rank of an icon, even to that of a great subject of painting such as the Madonna or the Carrying of the Cross.
Thus, under the artist’s hand, La Peinte takes on a far less comical turn, doesn’t it?
Tom Masson.