Christophe Bogdan

An artist of Polish origin, Christophe Bogdan lives in Sceaux, a few kilometers from Paris. Seeking new pictorial challenges, this painter explores original mediums and probes the recesses of the soul.

Christophe Bogdan quotes Antoni Artaud: "This confession, will you allow me to complete it today, to take it up again, to go to the very end of myself?" Going to the very end of oneself is the quest of this painter. Bodies that overflow the frame, prisoners of a canvas that struggles to contain them, sad looks... Alone, plunged into darkness, Christophe Bogdan's characters express solitude, relationship problems, confinement. His works are all confessions of what he experiences. "I express what I feel. My well-being, my discomfort. Beauty, I don't care." Without complacency, Christophe Bogdan paints with his guts. "Painting must reflect the soul."

Naked, dense, they weigh down with all their weight on shapeless blankets. With bluish, bruised skin, these two women, painted by Fausto Pirandello in 1923, are exhausted. Christophe Bogdan discovers Composition of Nudes and Yellow Slippers in Venice. Impressed by the brutality and modernity of the canvas, he decided to devote himself to painting. Born in Warsaw, he studied architecture there before moving to Paris in 1981. He was 25 years old and enrolled at the École nationale des arts décoratifs. After completing his studies, he decided to stay in France and became closer to the Polish artistic community present in Paris. His practice is part of the "decentrist" movement. Theorized in 1987 by artist guru and writer Adam Wisniewski-Snerg, this pictorial movement decenters the subject, placing it outside the frame. Attention is drawn to the environment, which reveals a lot about the character's psychology. It is their solitude in particular that Christophe Bogdan highlights. Bodies cut off by the frame in a nearly empty interior, we see them, among all the piled-up canvases, in his Sceaux studio, the "Bloc-House," affiliated with the Maison des Artistes since 1982 and where he has been based for around ten years.