Stéphane Erouane Dumas
"Les âmes sœurs"
Stéphane Erouane Dumas’s work reveals the marks of time visible in the different strata on the chalky cliffs in Normandy, which he has been relentlessly painting for years. Into the subject matter he weaves a composition pitted with crevices that are given subtle depth through the play of light and varying tonality. Over time a strange alchemy has emerged between the painter and his subject — captured on the canvas using pigments, marble powder and hide glue that are by turns scratched and rubbed out then worked over to obtain the desired variations of transparency and matter. “My technique is visual above all. I have to be able to feel the power of the subject — the subject needs to give something to me so that I can give in turn, thus offering up my own vision.” Stéphane Erouane Dumas
“Stéphane Erouane Dumas’s work has absence in its grasp. A bare, avid absence which makes whatever revolves blindly around the illusions of the world vanish within. Each painting perpetuates a single moment in an accomplishment that is always imminent, always put off. Something unsettling and unprecedented takes root, akin to the unthinkable beginnings of the world. In the beginning, there were cliffs, and the slow breathing of the outside ... In the veils of the work, in its many folds, drawn-out tension can be glimpsed — the sheer density of the ultimate matter — right down to its immobile creaking, the muffled presence of convulsive springs, suddenly gushing forth after centuries underground, where the hidden forces of the deep mind reside, under the weightless scalpel of distant glimmers.” Christian Noorbergen, 2010
When the eye sets its gaze on the painter’s sculptures, they feel familiar. It sees the cliffs in them, as if the painting were suddenly standing before us, surrounded by real nature. There is no longer any need to feel wind or rain - the elements take hold of them, surrounding and recognising them. The artist started sculpting 5 or 6 years ago, like a culmination of his years spent painting cliffs. Stéphane Erouane Dumas wanted to take a risk, to try and find other terrains where he could convey this grandiose subject. Sketches tacked to the wall became small paper models, followed by mock-ups in clay, then plaster.
“Without ever giving in to abstraction, Stéphane Erouane Dumas’ work is governed by a sovereign sense of synthesis, of simplicity and of signs. Reduced to their simplest expression, the plastic elements borrowed from the field of the visible become daring shortcuts, striking abbreviations. Calligraphic and often hieroglyphic, Stéphane Erouane Dumas’ works reveal a disturbing strangeness, setting up nature - eternal and eternalised - as a reservoir of marvellous and impenetrable forms inspired by the chalky cliffs of Normandy or the snowy expanses of Scandinavia. Leaves, trunks and branches create strata that are melancholy at times and appeal to the poetic power of memory, that enchanting remembrance,” writes Colin Lemoine.
In 2014, the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire hosted Cliffs, a spectacular pictorial installation. This year, however, a bronze sculpture takes centre stage. Driven by a singular tectonic shift, Les âmes sœurs are united at their base and begin their dance, rising up, simultaneously singular yet majestically parallel. They “betray the porosity between mineral and plant, between the skin of stone and the crumple of bark, between power and fragility. Standing opposite each other, or next to each other, these soulmates form a totemic image of softness. Larger than life...” continues the art historian and writer.
The artist spent a long time considering how much space to leave between the two facades, to allow them to overlap freely, without cancelling each other out. As the title of the work suggests, they stand before us like figures sharing a secret. What are they saying to each other? Reach out your hand to read their secrets in the asperities of the surface, and use your fingertips to decipher the musicality of a conversation from another world.
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Born in Boulogne Billancourt in 1958, Stéphane Erouane Dumas trained at the Académie Julian and then at the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, from which he graduated in 1984. A painter, illustrator and sculptor, the artist divides his time between Paris and Varengeville-sur-Mer in Normandy. His work can be found in a number of public and private collections in France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Luxembourg, Italy, Poland, England and the United States. He has also had solo exhibitions in Europe. Stéphane Erouane Dumas has illustrated a number of books for publishing house Éditions Fata Morgana. In 2012, he created a monumental project for La Verrière-Hermès in Brussels: Falaises, a polyptych in oil on paper, 44 metres long and 3.8 metres high. The work was exhibited in 2014 at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire, where the artist was invited back two years later for the Trees in Winter exhibition. In 2015, he learnt lithography at Idem in Montparnasse. In 2019, the documentary film about his work, Portrait d'un artiste, was awarded the MIFAC Special Jury Prize.
That same year, Dumas met ceramist Grégoire Scalabre and began a collaboration which gave rise to his first clay cliffs and culminated in his first bronzes made in Auvergne, at David de Gourcuff's Fusions foundry. In 2021, Editions In Fine published a monograph on the last five years of his work, with a text by Pascal Bonafoux. In 2023, Stéphane Erouane Dumas exhibited at the Musée Jenisch in Vevey, Switzerland, and in Provence, where three venues highlighted different facets of his work. First of all, there was the Variations végétales exhibition, dedicated to his pictorial work, at the Palais Abbatial de l'Abbaye Saint-André in Villeneuve-lez-Avignon. In echo to this, a large bronze sculpture was displayed in the La Paix exhibition at the Pierre & Poppy Salinger Foundation in Le Thor. Lastly, a monumental bronze - Les âmes sœurs - was unveiled in the grounds of the Château de Lascours in Gard. In spring 2025, a bronze replica of this sculpture will be installed at the Domain of Chaumont-sur-Loire.
Stéphane Erouane Dumas is a member of Cercle Design at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and is represented by Galerie Pierre-Alain Challier in Paris.