Jean-Michel Chesné

Born in Paris in 1959, Jean-Michel Chesné has been drawing and painting for 30 years; in the early '80s he discovered his passion for art, but his visit at the Palais Idéal du Facteur Cheval in Hauterives in 1992 made him decide to direct his work towards Art Brut and had a dramatic impact on his work, to the point that in 1997, he started to build a chapel and cave (in the garden of his house in Malakoff, France) covered with mosaics.

He is a self-taught artist always searching for new techniques and materials. He likes to produce series of works in order to use his new ideas and then move on to something else. He makes anthropomorphic drawings in ink or chalk, fantastic works in colored pencils, but also ceramic heads and sculptures made of melted plastic.

There is a large gap between the themes and techniques that he uses while maintaining a very personal style. His main field is imagination, so Jean-Michel Chesné cannot be confined to the restrictive space of the canvas or of the sheet of paper.