617 Xyloglyphe Sculpture

Félix was born in France in 1976. He lives and works in Brittany. "I'm largely self-taught and this has shaped my entire approach to making art. I began painting in 2010, starting with realistic figure studies. At this time my work consisted mainly of portraits and nudes. These are beneficial subjects to learn as you are finding your style (much of my technique was based on scratch markings at the time). One of this series echoes even in my present day work, paintings that represent bodies – or parts of bodies – assembled and mixed. I called them Mélanzés (Creole) in memory of Reunion Island, where everything began. In 2016 I started to create abstract works. I felt imprisoned by realistic drawing and representation. An exhibition about Dansaekwha (Korean minimalism) persuaded me to change. I simplified the shapes, designs and colors. I created a lot in monochrome, sometimes employing complex methods… these were research works. The Outre Mers paintings are important when considering my art. Here lines and strokes dominate. With Outre Mers I push my ‘scratch and erase’ technique further – the line appears in negative ... it exists by its absence. The background of the canvas is the line. This idea persists in my current work. At the beginning of 2020 I visited a rock cave, Les Combarelles in the South West of France; the cave was not decorated with paintings, but only with engraving marks. These interlaced lines reveal the bodies of animals. I was fascinated. This resonates in some of my work: the bodies of the Mélanzés, the lines-by-absence of the Outre Mers works… a few months later I returned to figurative art. My current work, Glyphs, is a kind of summation of my last ten years of research: simplified figurations, freed from realism. More recently I have had the idea of volumizing these glyphs."