Born in 1977, Alexandre Geoffroy is a contemporary artist from southwest France. Based in Biarritz, where Atlantic light is constantly shifting with the hours and the tides, he has made it the raw material of his work. His calling was sparked by a double shock at the age of ten: first Pierre Soulages, that painter of black who could make light burst forth from it, then Nicolas de Staël and his abstract technique built on thick layers of paint. From this encounter came an obsession that would never leave him: that of matter itself.

Geoffroy juxtaposes tiny, strictly identical squares of oil paint—not painted but sculpted—on a background of the same color, but in a different shade. His very first canvas—monochrome and black, an unconscious nod to Soulages—already sought to recreate the texture of skin or leather, an epidermis viewed under a microscope. Since then, he has continued to explore the possibilities of this gesture, developing his own tools, far removed from traditional paintbrushes. He paints while dancing, he says, swaying from left to right without looking at the work head-on, to better sense the interplay of reflections and material he is shaping. The central role of color complements that of texture. The artist plays with vibrant, deep colors that constantly draw the viewer’s eye.

His work today revolves around two techniques. On the one hand, there are abstract bas-reliefs, where plaster sculpted into a dense grid evokes the skin of a snake or a crocodile—an almost living surface—which is then coated with spray paint and varnish, dressing it in a raw color nestled in every hollow of the piece. On the other hand, there are the more contemplative oil paintings on canvas, where the material loses none of its movement. In Cyclone or Croco blue, deep, nuanced blues evoke the ocean floor and the filtered light of the sea. This interplay of color intensity creates a simultaneous effect of transparency and opacity.

One can discern in his work a connection to kinetic art; the legacy of Vasarely and his optical games, or of Julio Le Parc, for whom color existed only in interaction with light. In other words, in Geoffroy’s work, movement does not stem from a repeated geometric motif: it arises from the relief itself—from the thickness of the plaster or the fine squares painted in oil—which captures and refracts light depending on the time of day, the angle, and the viewer’s position. This kinetic quality allows a single canvas to change its face in the morning and in the evening, seen head-on or at an angle, as a smooth surface or a textured material.

The precision of his technique leaves no room for error: each square must sit perfectly on the ones before it, and a 100 x 100 cm canvas requires the sculpting of at least 10,000 squares, carried out in an almost continuous motion. The most time-consuming part of the work, however, is not the execution itself but the mental preparation that precedes it: an idea that haunts him for several days before he can begin, and which demands his absolute concentration. Right up until the very end, each work remains a source of doubt: the artist cannot judge the surprise effect created by light and angle until the canvas is finished.

Obsessed with symmetry, depth, and the thickness of the material, Geoffroy describes his practice as an introspection as much as a quest for satisfaction. Each work is sold with its natural stained wood floater frame.