Samuel Perche

Samuel Perche's words and work express this need for repair. For healing, for individual and collective wounds, for traumatized imaginations from the past and the present, which he says he views "with great optimism, even if everything is about to explode tomorrow." This urgency is expressed implicitly in his work.

Samuel Perche's journey is thus part of a personal, collective, and open history, oscillating between intimate stories and community struggles - whether feminist, queer, or LGBTQIA+.

A videographer, then an actor for theater and television in Paris for ten years, he moved to Réunion Island in 2013, graduated from the École supérieure d'art and began exhibiting his work as a painter and sculptor. At the same time, he participated in the organization of the 1st Marche des Visibilités LGBTQIA+ de La Réunion and the creation of the LGBTQIA+ Centre of the Indian Ocean, while becoming involved as a cultural actor in the island's artistic sector.[1]

It is today in his native Brittany, where he will return to settle in 2024, that he continues his artistic research around contemporary masculinities and the liberation of speech.

If identity is what passes through the body, "revealing the intimacy of an individual and community desire" then stands as a new paradigm in his work, to question the silenced and invisible parts of a queer identity in movement.

"How can the gay body be an emblem of struggle in an era where sexual and gender identities question the foundations of heteronormative society and refute the powers of a dominant white masculinity?" he asks.

It is through pictorial research posing an aesthetic that is both poetic and political that the artist explores the idea of desire, bodies and homoeroticism, to question their representations.

©Leïla Quillacq, 2024.

[1] In 2017, Samuel Perche presented his first solo exhibition of monumental sculpture @Corpus in the Galerie du TEAT Champ Fleuri. From 2019 to 2021, he was hired as artistic director and communications officer at L'enVoL, the leading development agency for artist-authors and dedicated structures, as well as project manager for the Fonds Réunion des Talents. In 2022, he became involved as coordinator of actions in favor of LGBTQIA+ people in Reunion Island within the LGBTQIA Center, of which he is one of the founders. As an exhibition curator, he designed Terra Incognita 1 and 2, as well as Au loin s'en venir at the Pavillon Martin, at the FRAC de La Réunion. NO MAN MEN, presented in 2022, is his first solo painting exhibition.