Stéphane Calais

Stéphane Calais’s surreal figurative paintings and found-object sculptures play at illegibility, but their seductive beauty aims at overcoming the artworks’ determined impenetrability. Using bright colors and fantastical, gestural strokes, his works look like anthropomorphic bouquets or bodies dissolving into expressive brush marks. Working in a range of forms and styles, Calais’s work includes bright ovati tondi paintings, sculptures built with Amerindian decorations and basketballs, and unique serigraphs made by layering street art-inspired portraits of famous men.

Calais has exhibited his work extensively throughout Europe at venues including the Centre Pompidou, the Hermitage, the Musée d’art modern et contemporain de Strasbourg, Paris’s Grand Palais, CAPC Bordeaux, and Les Abbatoirs in Toulouse.