Florent Stosskopf is a self-taught painter based in Brittany, France, whose work deftly subverts traditional art-historical themes and archetypes through a contemporary perspective, reminiscent of Jonas Wood, Guy Yanai, Hillary Pecis, or Paul Wackers. Through the use of bright colours and razor-sharp line-work, his complex still lives and floral scenes borrow from the annals of Classical Antiquity, the Baroque movement, and Modernism as well as his own repertoire of imagery.
Stosskopf’s erudition toward art and its canon becomes fodder for his paintings; a sort of self-reflexive commentary on the very pedagogical tools that have kept the artist at bay are thereby dissected – or rather, the very compositional tools used for his paintings. That is to say his ‘learning tools’ become the material for his works. Art books on Picasso, Matisse, and contemporary ‘blue-chip’ artists are depicted as strewn haphazardly about a busy, albeit still interior space. Do these spaces belong to the artist himself, offering us a unique glimpse into the life and pursuits of a passionate young artist eager to engage in a greater context? Or are they fantastical narratives, carefully crafted based on his own artistic discoveries and advances?
The sheer flatness of the works references Stosskopf’s so-called ‘former life’ as a graphic designer, but it is precisely that sensibility that lends itself to such vibrant paintings, teeming with energy and joie de vivre. Constructed like collages, Stosskopf’s paintings use saturated and vibrant colours, remove shadows to heighten both their stylized and disconnect from reality, translating the three-dimensional world into block colours and flat lines, all while retaining the complexity of the image.
