Stephan Balleux: Hybrid Painting Between Analog and Digital

Stephan Balleux, born in 1974, studied at the Académie des beaux-arts de Bruxelles and now lives and works in Berlin. His practice confronts painting with the digital age, using drawing, painting, sculpture, and video with special effects. He reworks genre scenes, documentary images, and pre-existing works with photographic realism reminiscent of Gerhard Richter, Glenn Brown, and Francis Bacon. Balleux covers Flemish vanitas with blooming flowers and moving forms, alternating between classical techniques (oil on wood, pastel) and digital technologies. In his 2004 work Painting Painting, he creates large portraits with shifting forms and garish colors. His 3D compositions feature 'organic compressions' or 'object-paintings' that materialize painting in another dimension, linked to actual paintings in the 2004 exhibition Is the Medium still the Message? at the Hoger Instituut voor Schone Kunsten Vlaanderen in Ghent. In spring 2010, Galerie Think.21 in Brussels showed works based on images from Belgium's colonial history. Balleux's work remains blurred in the viewer's relationship to painting and technology, as he states: 'Blur is a necessary passage in our relationship to the world and to works... My generation is still a hybrid generation, between analog and digital.'