Abstraction as
a window onto infinity.
Abstraction is Blanchard’s form of expression, a way for him to discover his inner self, «his window on the infinite» as he likes to call it.
Born in Poitiers in 1967, Blanchard attended the Fine Arts Academy where his first influence was the Italian Renaissance.
In 1992, after years of learning the meticulous technique of frescoes and extensive travels to Paris, London, and Canada, he arrived in San Francisco, one of the few truly international cities in the United States. In this melting pot of cultures, the Asian and latin influence became a source of inspiration for Blanchard on a professional and personal level.
The fusion of these two influences with his early training is what defines Blanchard’s work today. Blanchard’s hyper-realism technique is a way for him to create forms that are both light and dense, as well as harmonious and penetrating. The search for volumes that absorb into each other is at the core of the artist’s work.
Now, back in France where he lives in Nice with his Italian girlfriend and their daughter, the artist wants to show his ethereal relationship with time. He also wants to capture the light and make it an essential part of his paintings, which for Blanchard symbolizes life itself.
How to materialize the invisible?
How to respond with forms, colours and images?
These are questions Blanchard constantly grapples with in his paintings.
The artist seeks to capture time and space with harmony and grace. No touch of colour, light or substance is added at random on the canvas.
His work presents infinite and audacious spaces where the viewer can imagine the depths of his or her own passions.
Emotional, intimate and balanced.
From a purely etymological standpoint, eschewing any religious connotation, the word soul comes from the Old English sawol (life, spirit, being): the breath that gives animate existence, a link to life in all its forms.
Conversation of the soul.
This conversation between artist and medium gives way to reflection, in which life is accepted in all its many nuances, its pleasures, its pathos, its immanence.
It is an inner/outer dialogue in which sensory experience ties back into emotion that paves the way for new sensations.
The interaction gives the artist the opportunity to create a void, an absence of thought, in order to better unite with the inner stillness that is the perfect catalyst for conscious reality.
A succession of acts based on a perception of the present moment. A cathartic experience translated through movement, shape, colour and matter to transcend one’s own free will.
This conversation with the soul reflects its connection to the world and to others, spanning life, perception, and the palette of emotions it experiences, as well as its relationship with time.
Often embodied by a circle, time takes on an affective, three-dimensional aspect, like a running stream of acts, perceptions and emotions that exist beyond any present, past or future.
In this sense, the artist’s work is stripped of any intellectual thrust, preferring instead to remain emotional, intimate and balanced, shining through in its shapes, an interiority of human sensitivities.
