Sylvain Copete

My ideal of freedom implies a diversity of expressions and an instinctive approach to materials. The importance, in a technique, is the way in which one appropriates it. I therefore invent "skills" for myself. My creative work is a series of experiments, a moving whole that lives imperatively according to the degree of amusement it gives me.

Photography (blurred, motion-shifted, lomography) and printmaking (reproduction of my photographs) are inseparable for me. Sculpture from recovered objects (polystyrene, masks), drawing (felt pens, pencils), painting (acrylic), are variations of recurring themes: portraits, real or imagined, masks, the human is presented in its multiple forms. I paint, sculpt, photograph or reproduce in series, allowing myself the pleasure of variations. The presented series of ten "Portraits Basquiaises" (out of twenty-eight in total) was produced in the fall-winter of 2011, during gloomy "VRP stages" of commercial tours that I did for my work. In reference to JM Basquiat, whom I still admire. The theme of the imaginary portrait is a recurrence, of an ontological order and of universal value. There is a desire to reconstruct a fragmented world, to make it into a re-arranged, visibly human figure.