Home Sweet Home 22.04. - 27.05.2023
Stéphane Halleux is an artist who cannot be buttonholed into any specific era. Contemplating his work is like gently slipping into a world where the past and the future collide instantaneously recreating the delicious naïve qualities of an age when there were fewer restrictions to our dreams.
Stéphane Halleux was born in Belgium on 6 July 1972 and studied illustration.
He is a methodical artist and for the past 20 years he has created a coherent body of work that transports us to a strangely familiar ‘old-fashioned future'. His sculptures are the result is a very precise assembly of motley elements torn from their state of inanimate objects and transformed into the embodiment of fragile neuroses. His skill lies not just in creating the figures themselves, but also in creating their personalities. His principal raw material that is even more important than the leather, the metal or the wood that he uses, is the memory of human beings, the passions that drive them, their emotions.
Stéphane Halleux uses humour as the ferocious adjuvant to his creative process to reveal with cynicism the absurdity of the world. Each sculpture is a concentrate of paradoxes and internal conflicts.
His work has drawn international recognition in recent years. Tim Johnson, Animation Director of Dreamworks, for instance said of his work: “I'm drawn to Stephane's work as a fellow story-teller. His sculptures all seem to have popped out of an animated universe. It's their narrative quality that I find so arresting. They tell you a rich and complicated tale – while simply standing there”.
In 2014, his sculptures and his universe have been brought to life in the short film called "Mr Hublot" that has won the Oscar of the "Best Animated Short Film".
His intuition and his daring, in which we find traces of Marcel Duchamp, René Magritte and Marcel Broodthaerts, take him down a long distant road towards a modern mythology that has yet to be written.
