FABIEN CONTI

Throughout his artistic instruction in the Beaux-Arts of Paris, Fabien Conti has developed a personal style of painting that involves several layers of preparation and various techniques and materials, from acrylic, spray paint to oil painting. His work is informed by readings on colour theory and perception and aims to captivate the viewer and touch them emotionally through the aesthetic experience. There is a contemplative or meditative aspect to his practice, o!en referring to the painting as a window to a reality with a calming, soothing, power. Conti also delve in the aesthetic of the sublime, inspired by Romantic painting, but anchored in the present, with references to a post-apocalyptic future, devoid of human presence that nevertheless emanates a sort of idealised beauty. He recognises the mesmerising qualities that lie beneath these visions of polluted skies, and concentrates in the elements of renewal, such as the forces of nature taking over the ruins of the past.

“In the era of the Anthropocene and faced with the environmental impasse towards which our society is heading, I turned to Romanticism whose subject matters still surprise by their astonishing relevance. In reaction to mass industrialisation, the landscape and the treatment of nature became for me, as earlier for the Romantics, the preferred subject of my practice. Stripped of all severity, the oppressive absence of the Human gives way in my practice to a perfect expression of the spirit where successive pictorial strata are able to translate the vegetal insubordination of a world in disarray. Behind these entanglements of lines and materials I seek to withdraw from reality to reach a passive world of pure impression and finally, to try to approach by the colour this “peaceful feeling of the sublime”, the one which will lead us with Goethe towards the side of the loneliness, absence and death.”

— Fabien Conti

Through his paintings, Fabien Conti explores images of nature and post-human landscapes. These apocalyptic visions retain nevertheless a form of idealisation and beauty, that manifests as well in the presence of nature slowly taking over. The aesthetic of the sublime goes hand in hand here with the inspiration of science fiction, and the result is a soothing, meditative, window into a field of colour and form. Like many of his works, this series of untitled landscapes are influenced by the tradition of abstract painting, and underlines the importance of perception of colors to create an emotional impact in the viewer.