Sébastien Bouchard

Musician, fan of Surf, Skate and alternative rock culture, Sébastien Bouchard began his studies at the Beaux Arts in Nantes, where he very early on abandoned the formalism of conceptual discourse for the practice of graphics and the discovery of new digital tools.

From 1994, in the early days of the internet in France, in the digital workshop of the school, autonomously, Sébastien Bouchard trained and created his first flyers, stickers, posters, T-shirts for groups and music festivals of the region. Punctuating his course with stays in Senegal, Sébastien Bouchard goes to meet a recup-art and popular art brut that his father then residing in the country collects. As soon as he graduated in 1996, Sébastien Bouchard moved away from contemporary art and began a professional activity as a graphic designer without losing his artistic activity. During the stays in Brazil, where he continued training in Capoeira, he filled and scribbled many notebooks, then settled in 2001/2003 in the Republic of Guinea, and undertook a series of paintings on large paintings of schools made locally. When the opportunity in 2005 to live in Senegal arises, Sébastien Bouchard abandons his job as a graphic designer in the agency created a few years earlier with friends and establishes his house and his workshop in Palmarin, in Sine-Saloum, southern region. from Senegal. It was in Dakar that meetings with the local artistic scene began and many exhibitions followed. Since returning to his hometown in 2010, Sébastien Bouchard has continued his exhibitions and collaborations with artists and galleries from West Africa, participated from 2014 to 2016 in the founding of Prisme, a collective workshop-gallery in Nantes and has been transposing in recent years his work in the street (collages and painting on walls).

Sébastien Bouchard, through the various pictorial references and the multiplicity of mediums he uses, tries in his own way to overcome the cleavage between popular art and learned art. his work refers to painting but also to graphic arts, pop culture, urban art.