Artists in residence

Peter Baran was born in Bratislava, Slovakia in 1993. He graduated in 2019 from the prestigious University of the Arts in London and has decided to pursue his career as a sculptor. Peter’s fascination with concrete comes from the material itself – it is classless and globally used, allowing him to capture the ideas of universally understood objects, which can carry a different meaning or status depending on their owner’s geographic location.

Concrete is the primary building material of our world, it is the most material made by us. In 2021, he started the REGULAR CONCRETE – the studio, where he is the sole maker and designer of sculptures. Peter’s custom concrete mixture that he had developed for his practice and the hand sanding pushed the limits of the material to new levels. It allows him to contradict what he likes to call the “material stereotype” – when people hear the word concrete, they usually imagine something rough and big and extremely heavy, but in his works, this material is used with very fine details and a smooth finish.

He treats concrete like marble. Making this material mismatch creates fascination or more questions or both – but, that is what he wants, to make the audience think.

Sosthène Baran was born in 1990 in Blois, he lives and works between Caen and Paris. He obtained his DNSEP in 2020 at the fine arts school of Caen. He practices painting after various training as a cook, decorative painter and graphic designer. He has exhibited at the Prix Novembre in Vitry, in several art centers, including the Bains-Douches in Alençon and for a monographic exhibition at the Shed in Rouen.

“In his silent paintings, shadows pass, silhouettes slide and ghosts are guessed.

Even the frames are contaminated by this latent evaporation, as if the pictorial matter inhabited by an entropic force absorbed everything around it, punctually delivering and regurgitating apparitions on its surface.

Traversed as much by SF stories as by those of mythical inspiration, Sosthene Baran seems to engage in an esoteric hand-to-hand combat with the act of painting, seeking to ‘reach something like an extraterrestrial painting’.

The elements found at random in his wanderings – door, wooden casement, window frame, headboard – become his supports, in a gesture motivated as much by a desire to emerge in the place of fallen things, as by an economy of means.

His work of preparation of the funds, inherited from his activity of painter-decorator, functions like a mantra, an instrument of vision where the successive alterations of the flatness, between violence and softness of the rubbings, sandings and scratches, aspire to the inamissible.

A vain search so much the mirages seem fragile.

In that, the painting of Sosthene Baran holds the fantastic, it persists in a form of indecision, not seeking to invent a world, but to interfere with the already there.

– Excerpt from an article by Elena Lespes Mũnos for the magazine In-Sert n°1 by RN13bis, September 2022.

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