Sosthè ne Baran

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Cette œuvre devant nous, Marc Donnadieu

“Look carefully, what you are going to see is no longer what you have just seen,” professed the great Leonardo da Vinci, both sovereign of geometric exactitude and maestro of illusions. This sentence applies perfectly to the plastic research of Sosthène Baran, not only because the art of glazing or that of Leonardesque sfumato hold no secrets for him, but above all because they are expressed only through ellipses, traps, and other trompe-l’œil.

What we admire at first sight will therefore no longer really be what we contemplate a moment later, once we have noticed, moved, and rearranged all that the artist has left at the disposal of our gaze, if not of our very hands. For his paintings are as much collages of objects, his collages bas-reliefs, his bas-reliefs altarpieces, his altarpieces cabinets of curiosities.
There is thus nothing accidental in his works, so much are they the result of a carefully elaborated work whose skill combines with subtlety. And the more their process and their workmanship fade or become invisible, the more their nature and their expression are revealed and manifested beyond their mysteries and their strangeness. However, nothing here forms a system, in the sense that everything should break with its origin in order to structure itself autonomously and independently. On the contrary, everything is connected by a fine network of threads as tenuous as they are strong, of in-betweens as eloquent as presences, of mechanisms as ingenious as sleights of hand.

“Art exists, remains in its history for the same reason that the work is always before us. Exercise of a desire which does not lack objects, but which each time misses its object, turning back too late, turning aside too soon. It is for this reason that I can at the same time remember and live, be memory and innocence, walk in the step of time, ceaselessly crossing the space of reminiscence and mirage where meaning shines and recedes,” declared Gaëtan Picon in his essay “Admirable Tremor of Time.”

With Sosthène Baran, space and time are superimposed, associated and fused, even reversed, so as better to metamorphose images into apparitions without origin or predetermined destiny. One could almost affirm here that reality does not exist, for as soon as it appears before us, it is already caught in the interlacing of present and past, of vision and of its memory.
There is therefore no more reality here than there is waiting, hope, or desire for, by, and through a real considered as a territory of possibilities. Thus the artist tirelessly surveys it in search of a few nuggets of the marvelous or the extraordinary inserted in the gangue of the everyday and the ordinary. And, as an entomologist this time, he never ceases to observe and analyze them in order to grasp all their faculties and potentialities, then to put them into operation in every sense of the term.
What is born under our dazzled eyes is therefore only the result of a process of preliminary rebirth between his magician’s fingers of figures and forms: what seems to us a creation of today reveals itself as a fragment of history, a sculpture carefully shaped found object — and vice versa! What one finds there is only what is found again…

It is not by chance either that, for this exhibition, he started—contrary to what might have been expected—from black backgrounds in order to make the lights spring forth more vividly. Did not Paul Claudel emphasize: “There are eyes that receive light and there are eyes that give it.”. With Sosthène Baran, the raw diamonds of reality, recut by his hand and then set in the heart of his own landscape of plastic experimentations, shine with all their brilliance. And their gleams have not yet finished illuminating the depth of our nights and the clarity of our days.

Text by Marc Donnadieu for the exhibition Du jour at Panis, Rouen, France.

Solo show of du jour,
from September 26 to November 22, 2024,
at Galerie Panis, Rouen (Fr). © Fred Margeron.

Le retour de la narration, Marie Maertens

Poetic, enigmatic… referring to classical subjects such as landscape or portraiture, Sosthène Baran’s paintings mark the beginning of a narration that rereads the history of art, at times flirting with science fiction, drawing us into an undefined, timeless space. Those familiar with 19th-century painting will naturally feel drawn to these works, in which one can sense an admiration for the symbolist Odilon Redon as much as for the Barbizon school and other landscape painters — artists extremely sensitive to the subtle evolutions of color and light.

Yet, when one looks more closely at the frames or objects that come to disturb or enrich his canvases, one also perceives a resurgence of the Dada spirit, and the pleasure of finding, collecting, accumulating… Beyond his classical fine arts training, he also worked as a decorative painter and masters perfectly the play of textures and depth.

Sosthène Baran often begins with the backgrounds — like washes of paint — in a studio overflowing with brushes of all sizes and tools for scraping and refining. Alongside the gradual emergence of the image, he introduces effects that slightly roughen the softness of his bluish or ochre tones and his natural dexterity, also through the addition of wood or salvaged materials. Little by little, he refines this uncanny strangeness, widely explored since its formulation by Dr. Freud…

Text by Marie Maertens for the exhibition “Le retour de la narration,” July 2023.

Jours ordinaires, Elena Lespes Muñoz

This detachment from reality is something Sosthène Baran seeks in quite another way. Ever alert to an unintentional trace left upon the canvas — a mark that signifies despite itself — the painter pursues an image that cannot be articulated. In his silent paintings, shadows drift, silhouettes glide, and ghosts are barely discernible. Even the frames seem contaminated by this latent evaporation, as if the pictorial matter, inhabited by an entropic force, were absorbing everything around it, occasionally releasing and regurgitating fleeting apparitions on its surface.

Permeated as much by science fiction narratives as by those of mythical inspiration, Sosthène Baran seems to engage in an esoteric wrestling match with the act of painting itself, striving to “reach something like an extraterrestrial painting.” The elements he scavenges during his wanderings — a door, a wooden panel, a window frame, a headboard — become his supports, in a gesture driven both by a desire for resurgence of fallen things and by an economy of means.

His work of preparing the backgrounds, inherited from his activity as a decorative painter, functions like a mantra, an instrument of vision where successive alterations of the surface — between the violence and softness of rubbing, sanding, and scratching — aspire to the unattainable. A vain quest, for the mirages seem so fragile. In this sense, Sosthène Baran’s painting belongs to the realm of the fantastic: it persists in a state of indecision, seeking not to invent a world, but to interfere with what is already there.

Text by Elena Lespes Muñoz for an article in the magazine In-sert No.1 by RN13bis, published in May 2022.

Bliss, Fiona Vilmer

Almost unconsciously, one realizes that the atmosphere causes everything related to reality to become opaque through the hidden fiction within the forms. Thus, reality as a vector of images turns into a blurred, malleable substance. Constructed within a poetic mode, this substance imprints fictions that merge with gestures and their emergence.

Sosthène Baran’s paintings bear witness to attempts at detachment from reality, their pictorial layers — imbued with an auratic quality — revealing floating figures.
Text by Fiona Vilmer for the exhibition DATA-BAT, early 2021 with les Bains-Douches at Alençon ( Fr )

View of Divinités, fleurs, plis et replis, at Les Bains-Douches art center at Alençon (Fr).