Stéphane Pencréac'h. Et Caetera

Olivier Kaeppelin, Stéphane Pencréac'h. Et Caetera, Paris, Éditions Lord Byron, 2023

1st edition
Edition of 300 copies
Hardcover, 22 x 28 cm, 64 pages
French English edition
Translated in English by David Michaelson and Jonathan Michaelson
ISBN : 978-2-491901-48-6

The catalog Stéphane Pencréac'h. Et Caetera documents the artist's solo exhibition at the municipal gallery Julio Gonzalez in Arcueil, which runs from January 20 to March 11, 2023. The text is by Olivier Kaeppelin. It was produced with the support of the Arcueil City Council and Marin Beaux-Arts.

"The first effect of Stéphane Pencréac'h's painting is to deliver us to the disorder. Not to the disorder or confusion but to this sensation that we feel in front of a substance, "a liquid which is not limpid, containing particles 'in suspension', the dictionary adding, the air of nothing, particles "worrying somewhat." This concern is a movement, a thought, and it is through it that I enter the work of Stéphane Pencréac'h. It is through it that the mind is on the lookout and opens, in response, the floodgates of the unconscious." (Olivier Kaeppelin).

Stéphane Pencréac'h is a French artist born in 1970. After studying history at the University of Paris VII, he began, in the early 1990s, to work in painting, sculpture and drawing, organizing exhibitions himself. His first exhibitions took place at the end of those years.

Stéphane Pencréac'h has worked with some of the most important French galleries such as the Beaubourg Gallery founded by Pierre Nahon, the Anne de Villepoix Gallery, and the Vallois Gallery.

In 2012, he was one of the initiators of the Underrealism movement, along with Serbian artist Vuk Vidor and Franco-American artist Kosta Kulundzic, set up as a reaction to the conceptualization of contemporary painting: for these artists, the image must take precedence over the idea and not the other way around.

His work has been the subject of numerous monographic exhibitions in institutions of reference such as the Marc-Chagall Museum in Nice in 2002, the contemporary art center of Sérignan in 2003, Le creux de l'enfer, Centre d'art contemporain de Thiers in 2004, the MAMAC in Nice in 2014, the Arab World Institute in 2015, the André-Malraux Contemporary Art Space and the Unterlinden Museum in Colmar in 2015.

Olivier Kaeppelin is a French curator, art critic and writer. From the 1990s to the end of the 2010s, he held many senior positions at France Culture, Radio France, at the Ministry of Culture and Communication where he was the Director of Visual Arts from 2004 to 2010, at the Palais de Tokyo as well as at the Maeght Foundation, of which he took charge from 2011 to the end of 2017. In addition, he was a researcher at the École normale des Hautes Etudes, taught at the University of Paris-VIII in the Literature department , at the Panthéon-Sorbonne University in the Art History department, as well as at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes.

Creator of literary and artistic reviews such as Exit and Le Grand 8, he collaborates with numerous publications such as Art Press, Beaux-Arts magazine, Change, La Quinzaine littéraire, L'Autre Journal, L'Ennemi, Libération or Opus. He has also written a number of essays and texts, notably on Gérard Gasiorowski, Daniel Dezeuze, Richard Baquié, Imi Knoebel, Richard Deacon, Enzo Cucchi, Gunther Brüs, Bernard Moninot, Jaume Plensa, Pierrette Bloch, Erik Dietman, Joan Miró, Jonathan Lasker, Yan Pei Ming, Daniel Pommereulle, Damien Cabanes, Gérard Garouste, Philippe Cognée, Claire-Jeanne Jézéquel, Lee Bae, Djamel Tatah, Eduardo Arroyo, among many others.

Exhibition curator, he is at the initiative of events such as La Triennale (La Force de l'art), the first edition of which was held at the Grand Palais in 2006 and at Monumenta, an event which offers an artist to international notoriety to invest the Nave of the Grand Palais, like Anselm Kiefer, Richard Serra, Christian Boltanski, Anish Kapoor, Daniel Buren, Emilia and Ilya Kabakov or Huang Yong Ping. He was curator or co-curator with leading artists in particular for the Universal Exhibition in Seville, the Villa Medici, the Venice Biennale, the Kunstmuseum Pablo Picasso in Münster and the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl in Germany , the Nantes Museum of Fine Arts, the Tokyo National Arts Center, the Workshops of the Modern Art Museum of the City of Paris (ARC) and many other institutions around the world.