Stéphane LEROUX
Gold Circle – 2019
Watercolor
Geometric, Abstract
Stéphane Leroux is a French painter based in Tokyo.
His body of work focuses on the concept of time. He explores the connections between form, pictorial material, and the accident process.
The form, a singular square surface, is repeated within an overall composition, drawing inspiration from the geometric rigor found in Japanese design and architecture, or in the patterns of folding screens structured with gold leaf. The material, pictorial and fluid, is reduced to ink: black for shadow, gold for light. The accident process, for its part, is a play of encounters that brings together the materials deposited on this surface, mixing randomly until they solidify and thus mark Time.
Each surface is individually composed in an organic and empirical way, but juxtaposed with the others, they form an inseparable whole, an organization of fragments of light and shadow in a perfect, rectilinear composition that repeats itself infinitely.
Stéphane Leroux plays with these fragments of light and shadow, of memory, of fleeting minutes. Each surface represents the passage of time. It is an organization of time, of diurnal and noctural. Black absorbs and gold illuminates, like the daily cycle. Each fragment is identical in form, yet different in content, like a new day, distinct from yesterday or tomorrow.
By highlighting the idea of the repetitive process of the creative act and pushing it to infinity, Stéphane Leroux reflects back to us our own lives, to our time that slips away, repeats itself, and is constructed daily from acts and events until our own death.
Works
Biography
Stéphane LEROUX
Holder of the National Diploma in Visual Arts (DNAP) and the Higher National Diploma in Visual Expression (DNSEP) from the Rouen School of Fine Arts. In 1996 and 1997, he received two consecutive scholarships, one to the Trondheim Academy of Arts in Norway under the tutelage of the artist Duba Sambolec, and the other for a site-specific art project in India, where he also worked as a photojournalist for a local newspaper. Upon returning from India, he led several creative spaces in London and Tokyo. Seeking a studio, he settled in Paris in 2002, where he spent two years as part of the 59 Rivoli collective of artists involved in the underground art scene. In 2003, the painter encountered the work of contemporary writer Mamadou Mahmoud N'Dongo, who wrote the poem in English and French “In the room 6.8.1945” in response to a series of paintings entitled “Hiroshima is a black ink stain on a white sheet of paper.” In 2004, back in Tokyo, he won first prize for painting awarded by the city of Hiroshima at the “Nippon Cultural Taisho” and simultaneously continued his work creating installation paintings, staged for the musician Fumie Hihara, who composed the music for the installation “h memory” in 2005. In 2010, he founded and directed Atelier 485, a space for creation, exhibition, and exchange in Tokyo's Shibamata district. For the past ten years, artist Stéphane Leroux has been creating paintings, installations, and objects, which he regularly connects with the work of artists from diverse backgrounds and cultures. Currently, Stéphane Leroux lives and works in Tokyo as a visual artist, director of Atelier 485, and art teacher at the Lycée Français International de Tokyo.