Pierre Seinturier is always on the look-out, a pencil and a drawing book close at hand. He accumulates and records forms, images or even figures fated, most of the time from memory, to be transposed at the superior level of drawing, oil painting on canvas and paper.
Pierre Seinturier tells stories, or more specifically actions: a couple climbing into a small boat on a lakefront, a man chasing a woman on a footbridge above a canal, a hunter shooting at a target in a forest while his companion aims his weapon at him, or another man shooting at a bear in the luxurious green decor of an ancient forest from Western America. An apparent peace also foretells tragic events to come: a murder, a fight, a drowning… A muffled tension creeps into Seinturier’s work, who borrows from cinema but also from techniques of print images, framing, composition and precision of volumes to look like storyboards. Nothing is random, and depending on his mood, the artist also reworks the same theme by playing with variations of colour and narration to build scenarii with film noir-like plots.
Even though the heir of a particular pictorial tradition, Pierre Seinturier still manages to re-invent the genre by offering a resolutely contemporary painting, extending with brio the questionings and investigations of his predecessors. Like a free-rider of his own images, he is not really interested in stories or their moral, but more in the beauty of a moment, of a gesture.
Pierre Seinturier was born in 1988. He works and lives in Paris where he graduated from the École Nationale des Arts Décoratifs. In 2013, he won the special prize from the jury at the Salon de Montrouge and presents this year The torture never stops at The Musées des Tissus et des Arts Décoratifs in Lyon, as part of the modules by Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent (an exhibition showed until 5th January 2014).