ANDRE STEMPFEL

Born in 1930 in Villeurbanne, lives and works in Paris.

André Stempfel, a French-Swiss painter and sculptor, was born in Villeurbanne. As a teenager, he began his painting studies at a Lyon academy run by a disciple of Albert Gleizes, whom he met several times. After his parents moved to Grenoble, he attended the city's art school and university. He then settled in Paris, where he worked at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière and developed his personal style, free from any outside influence. In 1970, a fire completely destroyed his studio and his works. Following this tragedy, his style transformed; colors and forms became more refined, resulting in a more minimalist approach dominated by his signature yellow (Senegal yellow). A touch of humor, distorting and destabilizing his compositions, is part of his personal trademark. He is represented by several galleries in France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, and the Netherlands, including the Lahumière Gallery, which regularly presents his work at international art fairs. He now divides his time between Paris and Avignon.

While his current work is often compared to minimalism or constructivist art, Stempfel views these not as an end in themselves but as a starting point, a subject. The minimalist motif is explored in sequences of multiple elements that disrupt the established order, sometimes transforming a painting into a sculpture. This unexpected shift inevitably generates a subtle humor.

“[…] Stempfel speaks of a joyfully baroque and slightly wacky world where paintings are hung straight and doors are drilled crookedly, but poses, without emphasizing it, casually, with the elegance of playfulness, the question, as old as painting itself, of the third dimension.”

Harry Bellet wrote in Le Monde on April 19, 1999

Stempfel paints from an idea, but it requires, in a subtle way, a great deal of ingenuity and trial and error in its execution. In short, he's a conceptual artist, but by no means lazy. Even though he much prefers the small, pivotal part of the work, the rest receives his full attention. He becomes a manipulator of the minute, the intimate, the very details whose artful attention to detail ultimately disrupts everything. Stempfel places himself in the strange position of intervening on another artist, who is none other than himself; he consciously disturbs, in a second stage, what he had patiently constructed in the first. A simple gesture, and it unveils—introduces the disruptive element into the painting, which ceases to be meticulously composed: "I remove or add a tiny detail." Here and there are sudden, impulsive movements, others slow, small and large shifts. But everything takes place with the utmost rigor in relation to the visual language.

What is striking here is the artist's taste for solid, assertive and light forms at the same time, his sense of plastic pleasure, which has always brought him together with the simplification of forms and signs that he likes in the painting of the great Italians: Uccello, Giotto, Piero della Francesca.

Thierry Dufrêne