Gaetan de Seguin

In his native land of Aude, Gaëtan de Séguin has always painted figures or human silhouettes. Nothing new since his childhood: he has always painted “bonshommes”, like most children. But he never let go of the subject and made it the heart of his work. Not characters that are more and more precise and individualized, on the contrary: characters that form a crowd, characters that gather and end up overflowing from the canvas. Crowds dense or sparse, cheerful, dignified, silent or roaring, poignant or abject, etc.
Each canvas offers numerous characters, but they only work by their integration into the whole. Sometimes they are quickly individualized (stripes, stripes of different colors, circles, but almost never faces), but the work remains a work on the mass: “I cover my canvas with a dominant color very dense, almost shouting. Then this undercoat is completely covered, the tone becomes clear again and the tints melt into a cameo of colored grays. From there, I can start to paint by adding or subtracting material. The music that I listen to will then give rhythm to the appearance of the group. By scratching with the most diverse tools, I paint as much as with brushes. Each asperity, each scratch is a unique motif that characterizes the individual as much as it allows him to melt into a much more global and abstract dimension”.
To his paintings, the artist adds crowds in relief. The crowd, which can be frightening and impersonal, becomes again a synonym of diversity where each one brings his stone to the edifice: it is enough for each one to concentrate on an individual and to give him some features which will individualize him, to take him out of the mass.
And then, from time to time, the painter chooses himself to extract certain characters from the crowd. The canvas then chooses the character as its own subject, but the crowd remains present, sometimes as a discreet watermark in the background of the painting. The individual draws his singularity from the sole fact of getting out of this mass which saturates the horizon. He doesn’t necessarily have a face, but he has an activity: he plays, he meditates, he finds a couple life, etc. He is aware of belonging to a whole, without being under the gaze of all. The life of the individual takes over, in a world that only makes sense if it is carried by all.