Frédéric Choisel

At eleven years old, Frédéric Choisel starts to take his first photographs with an old Pentax camera. It leads him a few years later to the Ecole Supérieur d'Etudes Cinématographiques of Paris. After graduating, he has the honour to work with the painter Gaétan de Rosnay, whose post-impressionist style and contagious enthusiasm for painting had an influence on his artistic researches. The painter encourages him to explore classic painting, the light and the shapes in Dutch and Spanish paintings of the XVIIth century, as well as the French artists as Delacroix, Courbet, Chardin or Corot. The eye is formed and the hand disciplines itself.

Settled in San Francisco, Frédéric Choisel starts a career in audiovisual production with the elusive desire of pictures that takes him away from painting. The contact, sensuality, physical dimension, material, which are absent of photography, are missing him. So he starts to mix his experience of photography with his first classic and realistic paintings. Then, he goes towards the Abstract Expressionists, attracted by the work of Cézanne, and in particular of Kooning and Staël. His work is distinguished: A rigour that led him to be regularly exhibited in San Francisco.

Today, in a great part of his work the idea of "passing" persists as for Frédéric Choisel reality is the combination of several attempts to understand and represent the world. Thus, his new abstract floral series called "Akua" (which refers to the gods of the oceanic islands) distils force, undeniable plastic beauty, but also the dimension of fullness that extends with the time in his presence.

It is a specific manner to walk into the painting by creating new spaces where abstraction is a trend that first takes us further away, and then frees the mind from preconceived ideas.