Matthieu Balmes

I'm Matthieu Balmes, an artist based in Nantes, France.

By day, I work as a manager. In the evenings and on weekends, I make things.

This isn't a contradiction — it's a balance. My work teaches me to structure, to decide, to hold complex threads together. Creating reminds me that there are spaces where not knowing where you're going is exactly the point, and that's where the interesting things happen.

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I work with everything. Acrylic, watercolor, pencil, markers, gold leaf, mixed media. I don't have a favorite medium — I have ideas, and I look for what fits them. Sometimes a thought calls for the fluidity of watercolor. Sometimes it demands the precision of a fine liner or the brilliance of gold.

What fuels me is what moves through me: daily life, scientific reading, concepts that resist easy understanding, conversations that catch fire. I'm the kind of person who gets genuinely excited at 11pm about quantum mechanics or philosophy, and wants to make something from it the next morning.

The studio is where those ideas become images.

Self-taught, with a lot of help.

As a kid, my parents signed me up for art classes, officially to keep me busy after school and on weekends. As a teenager, they dragged me to museums at an age when I had much better things to do (or so I thought). Their plan worked, just more slowly than expected.

At school, I stayed on the serious track: math, science, and in 2010 an engineering degree from Supélec (now CentraleSupélec). Art stayed on the side, where nobody graded it.

I came back to it later in life. This time I'm staying.