FRAC Champagne-Ardenne

Exhibition curator: Marie Griffay

American painter of international renown, Stephen Felton (born in 1975, Buffalo) has been invited to produce a new series of monumental canvases for his monographic exhibition Teeth in the Grass at the FRAC, from June 17 to October 25, 2020.

Done freehand, Stephen Felton’s paintings are made from very simple geometric forms that question the medium and the foundations of mimetic representation in art. He develops an alphabet of signs similar to pictograms, a playful universal language that evokes both the imagery of childhood and cave art, with its rare depictions of the human figure. The search for a balance between the foreground and the background, the subject and the landscape, colour and white is at the heart of the artist’s work. Stephen Felton’s spontaneous, quasi-performative gesture resembles that of an amateur, contradicting the classical notion of skill and technique, as well as the romantic representation of the artist endowed with an exceptional talent, working tirelessly to perfect their art.

Stephen Felton’s work finds its origin or inspiration in a multitude of narratives; one simply needs to tell the stories. “Most of the time”, he claims, “I think about something I’d like to play with and I go in that direction”. Over the course of his various shows, the public will have recognized the figure of Moby Dick from Herman Melville’s novel (1851) or elements from Scenes from the Life of a Faun (Arno Schmidt, 1962) : a bike, a ladder, or a crescent moon.

For his exhibition at the FRAC, Stephen Felton makes use of the two floors of the former Jesuit College to tell a love story in two acts. This story not only evokes major literary works but their multiple contemporary adaptations. Indeed, it is essentially the idea of the “remake” that interests Stephen Felton.