Eki Mekki Kaadar, 2025

Stéphane Fauchille  

Stéphane Fauchille, Dream Anthropologist

"Would you like, for a moment, to become the Claude Lévi-Strauss of an Aboriginal people from an Australia unknown to any map? Then enter the phantasmagorical painting of Stéphane Fauchille, ethnologue of the unknown, a scholar of distant civilizations, no doubt lost somewhere in the cosmos, which cannot fail to touch the imaginations of science fiction lovers (SF, the initials of Stéphane Fauchille).

Tattooed or feathered, these surprising natives are nonetheless possessors of unusual instruments, evoking an enigmatic technology. These apparent savages are seemingly more evolved than we are. Mysterious boxes, convoluted mechanisms whose function eludes us, a prehistory endowed with futuristic comforts… One thinks of the fantastical inventions in Raymond Roussel's 'Locus Solus'. The surrounding nature—a suave, multicolored, fantastic jungle—recalls in its inventiveness 'Fantastic Planet', the animated masterpiece by Topor.

Stéphane Fauchille as a draftsman (drawing is fundamental to him) clears his mind and gives himself over freely to uncontrolled oneirism, a kind of automatic drawing that generates a whimsical universe, gushing like oil in the desert from a mysterious and inexhaustible unconscious. His drawings accumulate in a database filled with random discoveries. When he moves to painting, often on large formats, he feels the need for an organized, structured composition, long-matured and requiring several preparatory sketches.

Whether inspired by old engravings or reports found in Paris Match or National Geographic, strange and eccentric subjects spark his fantasy: extraterrestrial typologies, the Beatles surrounded by rabbits and pea cans, conquistadors reduced to malicious dwarves, a Michelin Man bristling with arrows, an underwater Vespa, and of course, anything resembling the fetishes of a Quai Branly museum fallen from the Milky Way.

Painting that flouts the 'intellectual' label and loves to tell strange stories has earned its pedigree from Hieronymus Bosch to Salvador Dalí. With the perfect precision of a highly developed technique, Stéphane Fauchille loves to tell stories—preferably improbable ones—crazy tales told with the deadpan seriousness of a scholar anthropologist." — Xavier Bureau