Sébastien Mahon

Sébastien Mahon was born in 1970. He lives and works in Bordeaux. In conversation he passes quickly over his time at the Beaux-Arts de Bordeaux, where he was introduced to the influences of the day, somewhere between figuration libre and the dominant currents of contemporary art such as conceptual art. Without finishing the course he turned to graphic training, which took him to Paris and into visual communication, as an illustrator and roughman. He kept painting at a distance from any plan to live off it, while never letting go of the idea of making it his real work.

After a residency and an exhibition in New York, the turning point came with a move to China in 2008. Family life took him to Beijing, where his wife took up a post. He spent about ten years there, in Beijing and then in Shanghai, experimenting and exchanging as much culturally as professionally. He describes a period of stupefaction as a foreigner, which he also experienced as a form of release. He observed new ways of making which, in his own words, settled his relationship to time and to the adventure of carrying a work through. The discovery of new supports and materials, paper above all, and of Asian philosophy gradually changed the way he looked. In China he drew the pines of his own region in Indian ink, a way of beginning his return home.

Back in Bordeaux, he continues his experiments with ink and paper in his studio without breaking with the painting of his earlier work, drawing the Western character of his practice closer to the Asian influences he has absorbed.

The plant world runs through all of it. “The perception of the plant world has always been a pretext for my painting, even when I was painting those cities of parallel worlds,” he writes. First came the pines, familiar figures of the coast and of regional culture, then canvases in brilliant, sometimes unnatural colour, where foliage is at once the subject and its own shadow. In the manner of the Impressionists he tries to seize the intensity of light and the variability of colour. His works are not conceived as series but as independent pieces on which techniques intermingle — work that, in the artist’s phrase, means “negotiating with incidence”, between command of a craft and letting go.

Zone Trois Galerie has given him two solo exhibitions: Ombres Foliaires, at Galerie Pia Pia in Bordeaux in May 2023, curated by Jules Duplantier, and an exhibition at the gallery from 5 December 2024 to 25 January 2025 bringing together oils on canvas and gouaches and inks on paper laid down on canvas.

The perception of the plant world has always been a pretext for my painting, even when I was painting those cities of parallel worlds. Plant life questions my thinking about the distinction between form and light, about the mystery of the matter of the real, physical and alive.

Out of my travels, my moves and my walks, my eye keeps turning between poetry and a kind of phenomenology that comes and goes between the studio and the outside world. It became clear to me that my subjects often returned to a state of hypnosis brought on by a landscape, a memory or a photograph. The paintings I am showing here, built around particular points of view, come out of that experience, which I am still pursuing. A mixed technique, combining ink and tempera on stretched, treated, laid-down papers.