About me
Born in 1970, my artistic adventure truly began at the age of 16, when I started exhibiting and selling my very first watercolors. This first contact with the public was a turning point. Self-taught, guided by curiosity and the need to explore new materials, I gradually expanded my practice to painting, mastering oil, acrylic, pastel, and collage, working with both brush and palette knife directly on the canvas.
After a period in Normandy, I returned to settle in Brittany, in Saint-Malo. The coastline, the Breton light, and the ocean constantly inspire my work. My paintings navigate between figuration and abstraction: I primarily seek synthesis, the interplay of contrasts, and the element of imagination, preferring atmosphere and emotion to strictly detailed representation. Whether seascapes, coastal landscapes, portraits, or abstract compositions, each canvas is a quest for balance between the strength of the medium and the freedom of the motif.
I have experienced this several times. In a contemporary art fair, you only need to look at the stands where the public crowds together.
Two main reasons in general: either the artist engages in dialogue by clearly explaining their artistic approach, or the public understands the artist's profound expression at first glance.
This is also the case with Lionel Chevallier and his - or should I say his - marine worlds, his coasts, his seas, his cliffs, his boats in all formats.
Even the wind is present, having carried you there that day. For his painting will captivate you: you will enter it, as if swallowed whole, according to its changing moods. Sometimes lyrical with its warm colors, other times somber with its landscapes and oceans rendered in broad strokes and geometrically arranged highlights, through a painting style with cool tones, yet oh so welcoming. And perhaps, like me, you will want to display it in your home to share the serenity that emanates so clearly from his Staëlian dreams bordering on abstraction.