Stéphane Thidet
Friday, 28 December 2012
Work from his oeuvre.
“…A slightly embarrassed Prosper Mérimée admitted “a keen taste for bandits”. As to how he felt about them, he added, “I cannot help it, but the energy of these men struggling against the whole of society elicits from me an admiration that I am ashamed of.” Thus a recent book celebrating these outlaws is subtitled “anarchistic, illegalist sharpshooters… they chose freedom”. The book’s author, Laurent Maréchaux, explains, “Not just anybody can be an outlaw. The man who decides to live outside the rules laid down by society is first of all a rebel motivated by great ideals: the will to change the world, to escape from poverty and to experience to excess a freedom that burns the fingers”.
Not yet entirely lost, but for how long… Stéphane Thidet might become one of them and a number of his works show his admiration for these rebels. Looking at his works, the viewer will doubtless be surprised at the change that comes over reality while its basic organizing features are upheld and their appearances only take us slightly away from verisimilitude. Unlike Surrealist paintings describing a world that is deliberately dispensed from the laws of gravity for instance, and careful to stress the pre-eminence of electro-magnetism as a generalized force of attraction on incongruous – incorrectly termed objective – chance events, here the four fundamental forces never fail…” – Jean de Loisy