Ivan de Monbrison

Art is for me the only answer in our modern world to the question of death and the fragility of human nature. Through the ages human beings have used the representation of the world as a medium to conjure what they saw has powerful elements of nature that they could not explain and which would threaten them. It included spirits of the ancestors, forces of nature, death itself etc. I think this process is still at the core of the art medium. To represent ourselves is still a mirror to our own self, and the consciousness we have of it is reflected in the very image on the surface. In a world of technology to choose to use still a very classical medium like painting is a way to set a bridge with the past resisting the facility of technology but with the will to represent the world with a modern eye. That is why I choose to paint mostly in black and white and to represent human beings more as shadows than as fleshy bodies. They are incarnated in the canvas but not yet fully present. I hope that people who have experienced pain and loss in life as absurd and meaningless will be able to connect with these ghostly shapes, these forms of precarity, as depths that go far beyond simple pleasures of the eye. (Ivan de Monbrison, Paris, 2010).

Ivan de Monbrison
“Art is for me the only answer in our modern world to the question of death and the fragility of human nature. Through the ages human beings have used the representation of the world as a medium to conjure what they saw has powerful elements of nature that they could not explain and which would threaten them. It included spirits of the ancestors, forces of nature, death itself etc. I think this process is still at the core of the art medium. To represent ourselves is still a mirror to our own self, and the consciousness we have of it is reflected in the very image on the surface. In a world of technology to choose to use still a very classical medium like painting is a way to set a bridge with the past resisting the facility of technology but with the will to represent the world with a modern eye. That is why I choose to paint mostly in black and white and to represent human beings more as shadows than as fleshy bodies. They are incarnated in the canvas but not yet fully present. I hope that people who have experienced pain and loss in life as absurd and meaningless will be able to connect with these ghostly shapes, these forms of precarity, as depths that go far beyond simple pleasures of the eye” (Ivan de Monbrison, Paris, 2010).