“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 industrialization, 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 color 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 was born in 1997 in Paris. He lives and works in Paris.
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 color 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, often referring to the painting as a window to a reality with a calming, soothing, power. Conti also delves 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 idealized beauty. He recognizes the mesmerizing 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.