Tristes tropiques, 2026

Stéphane Fauchille  

Signed by the artist in the lower right corner
Stéphane Fauchille, dream anthropologist

"Would you like, for a moment, to become the Claude Lévy-Strauss of the aborigines of an Australia unknown to maps?

Enter then into the phantasmagorical painting of Stéphane Fauchille, ethnologist of the unknown, learned anthropologist of distant civilizations, undoubtedly lost somewhere in the cosmos, which cannot fail to touch the imagination of science fiction lovers (SF, initials of Stéphane Fauchille).

Tattooed or feathered, these surprising natives nonetheless possess unusual instruments, suggesting an enigmatic technology. These seemingly savages are apparently more evolved than we are. Mysterious devices, intricate mechanisms whose workings elude us, a prehistory imbued with futuristic comforts… One thinks of the fantastical inventions of Raymond Roussel.

The surrounding nature, a sweetly variegated fantasy jungle, sometimes brings to mind in its inventiveness "Fantastic Planet", an animated masterpiece by Topor.

Stéphane Fauchille, a draftsman (drawing is fundamental to him), mentally empties his mind and freely indulges in uncontrolled dreamlike imagery, a kind of automatic drawing that generates a whimsical universe, gushing forth like oil in the middle of a desert from a mysterious and inexhaustible unconscious. The drawings accumulate in a database, filled with random discoveries. When he turns to painting, often on large canvases, he then feels the need for an organized, structured composition, carefully considered over time, requiring several preparatory drawings.

Whether he is inspired by old engravings, or by reports found in Paris Match or National Geographic, strange, eccentric, unexpected subjects appeal to his imagination: extraterrestrial typology (the and the others), Beatles (surrounded by rabbits and boxes of peas), conquistadors reduced to the state of wicked dwarves, Michelin Man bristling with arrows, underwater Vespa, and of course everything that resembles a Quai Branly that has fallen from the Milky Way.

Painting that scoffs at the label of art and likes to tell strange stories (this is not the least of its functions, even if of course it is not the only one), has acquired high credentials, from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí.

With the perfect precision of a highly refined technique, Stéphane Fauchille enjoys telling stories, preferably improbable ones, crazy stories recounted with the deadpan seriousness of a learned anthropologist.

Xavier Bureau