Nicolas Vionnet

Alexandre Dang

Anne Cecine Surga

Donald Bracken

Ivonne Dippmann

Sergey Sobolev

Switzerland

France

France

USA

Germany

Russia

Vionnet’ s preferred medium is acrylic on canvas. His chiefly largescale works play with space and expanse. Although almost always realistic, his paintings have more in common with abstract images than real landscapes.

He paints disruptive grey strips across his clouds and allows coloured surfaces to drip down the canvas in accordance with the laws of gravity. Vionnet is fascinated by such irritations: interventions that approach and create a non-hierarchical dialogue with the environment. This dialogue opens up a field of tension, which allows the viewer an intensive glimpse of both these phenomena.

All over the exhibitions in the world, I can see a very universal response from the audience: people mainly smile and start asking " How is this moving? What does it mean?" And this is for me the most important: bringing people to smile and to think about important contemporary issues. Although the works bring smile and seem easy, realising them is not just a children ' s game, it is really a lot of work! I have to conceive a first draft, do some pretesting, address the issues, find solutions, do some further tests, find again solutions, finetune etc … Realising a new work takes some months or sometimes some years. It ' s important to highlight it, as when it is realised, everything seems so easy …

I aim at exploring the values inherent to human nature. I am extremely interested in the question of the definition of the self and how much the social context in which we evolve is responsible in shaping our own image. As a woman artist, I am slightly more focused on defining women’ s identity. The current consumption society sends out tones of messages to every human, thus influencing how we see ourselves and how we want to define ourselves. I believe there is a psychological triangle between who we really are, what society tells us to be, and the image of ourselves we decide to project onto society. I like to create different levels of interpretation in my works, thus giving keys to the viewer to understand the subject I address without offering one single interpretation of the artwork.

My work explores combinations of painting and sculpture, light and shadow, movement, and earth and other natural materials. The actual process of creation always starts with a specific idea or a particular topic I want to research. Collaboration with the composer is essential prior to implementing the physical elements in the studio. Knowing that I’ m able to work with original compositions, which are created to help express my ideas. My view of the power of man as ultimately secondary to the power of nature has informed my art from its beginnings. I think of myself as a painter: the gestural movements of my recent kinetic sculptures have strongly influenced the path of my paintings.

My works generally starts from relatively small-scale drawings. A starting point, because these small formats will later encounter a different situation, an exhibition space, a stage or a book. They will transform themselves in order to adapt to a new room.

Nothing remains as it was and if Dippmann uses templates – which were originally used as illustrations for a book – and converts them into large-scale murals combined with colorful yarns

The sculptural art is a precise visual genre. Its shape is its language. The shape has distinct limits, otherwise it is amorphous, shapeless in other words. That ' s why I put my sculptures into concise shape, polish them up to the state of a sign, and get them rid of unwanted details to avoid anything arbitrary. Optimization is the sculpture ' s genesis.

The significance of meaning is put into the significance of form, as if into the box. The significance of meaning gets covered with a shell of the significant form.