Texts/critique

"...And I have looked at Sebastien's work. He is a mysterious and thoughtful painter.One wants, even looking at small reproductions, to keep looking at the images he depicts, enticed by the things not fully expressed, half phrases, hushed sounds, obliqued corners. Most pieces are part of a continuos but never fully told narrative. There is a link. But like in Hitchcock movies, one is never quiet sure what the real meaning of that link is, is one led into yet another spiral of a labyrinth, a maze, a journey that is not about solving, resulting, arriving but about experiencing the trip (La baie de Noumeols).. We are led, but we are not told where the arrival is and what awaits us. His work is cinematic. Like old technicolour movies or post-cards from 60-ies, they are both disturbing and nostalgic, like our memories of childhood. His work has something magical. The reverting perspective of the intentionally disturbed horizont (spectrum et vue sur le detroit), the over-bright blues of skies blending with electric seas, and the people, well, its another story.... I'd love to see the paintings in reality. "

                                                                                                              Varvara Shavrova

SEBASTIEN MAHAN “Where Land Ceases” 

...These extra ordinary cities, located where land ceases and oceans begin, are known to no earthly cartographer. Indeed, in the ingenious art of Sébastien Mahon, reality is transmuted into Utopia. And painting into a dream.

In his series entitled “Glorious Tropical”, a shift in time and place takes us back to another age, the “golden age” that since Hesiod, Ovid and Erasmus has haunted the imaginations of poets discontented with their day. The pictorial genre, here, is smashed. Painted in oil, yet surprisingly ethereal, we plunge into Mahon's images like the illustrations of a favorite storybook. The artist's evident desire to narrate likens his work to the comic strip; his pursuit of ingenuous happiness evokes naïve art; his focus on contemporary reality is reminiscent of American pop art. Mahon's easy “brush” play, furthermore, combined with the magical aura of travel that permeates his work creates an atmosphere of intimacy, of nostalgia.

 The word nostalgia word was coined by Swiss doctor J-J Harder in 1678 from the Greek “nostos”, returning home, and “algos”, pain/longing. In his “ Vocabulary of Aesthetics”, Etienne Souriau gives it a specific definition that raises it to an aesthetic genre. “Nostalgia becomes an actual form of artistic inspiration (...) when it moves beyond the level of mental representation in order to create an effective work, in which what is absent is truly present while retaining its aura of Elsewhere. Such works can have such an overpowering effect upon spectators that they are led to belong morally to a hitherto foreign land. This love of far-off places does not only apply to real countries; we are able to feel nostalgia for an imagined or mythical land, which a work of art can so forcefully embody that it is dispensed from existing materially.”

 All of Sébastien Mahon's works bear the stamp of this complex emotional state, personal and intense, troubling and nurturing - yet always precise. In earlier paintings, dealing not with faraway places but with a period of time that the artist is only indirectly familiar with, the 1960s, Mahon asks “What is reality's intrinsic relationship to a particular era?”

The originality of this back-and-forth lies in the materialization of a secret - imprisoned in an era and a world of its own - that through the intervention of images is transformed into a mythology.

Ileana Cornea

French artist Sebastien Mahon's landscape paintings presented audience with a brand new visual experience through his elastic brushwork. In Sebastien's landscape paintings, the landscape is always at the end of an unknown world: end of lands and end of mountains. The artist transformed the paintings of landscape to setting a stage and describing an event, combining paintings of landscape with people and event in his drawings to create a hypothesized sense of history. Although the artist's intention is still to create decorative landscape paintings, obviously this is a decoration totally different fromtraditional decorative paintings ideas.

Sebastien's painting is the visual presentation of his multicultural experiences. He graduated from Art Visual school of Bordeaux in France and has been educated with the stringent western painting techniques; however his paintings were not constrained by these technical standards. Purely from the mostly emphasized perspective relationship of western paintings, he has made some powerful breakthroughs. Focus perspective is a core concept in western painting technique , however, Sebastien boldly used the cavalier perspective usually used in Chinese traditional paintings while keeping the essence of western painting in term of color, giving audience a wonderful visual experience that surpasses time and space.

In terms of modeling technique, Sebastien combined realism and abstract together with collage art's graphic method. The illogical combination of abstract background and individuals is the presentation of the mood and concepts of the artist; it's purpose is to subvert a long standing esthetic tradition. The fascinating colour of Sebastien's work brought great visual pleasure to the audience, and it combined the beauty of the impressionist and the force of the expressionism.

The vitality of the Sebastien's painting lies within its spiritualism and it displayed a concern for contemporary humanitarian spiritual circumstances, something that normal landscape painting can't achieve but fully and naturally displayed with Sebastien's elastic brushwork. It is genuine and it abandoned the fashionable life and culture.

Sebastien's landscape paintings condense the outline of time and space and make us forget about the passing of time. His elastic brushwork updated the decorative concept to a higher altitude that has never been reached by landscape paintings. Such elasticity is a positive response from an landscape painting artist facing dramatic changes in social and natural environment.