cédric magnin

cédric magnin Biography

Switzerland

I was born in 1961 in La Chaux-de-Fonds (Switzerland). Following an uneventful scholarship and a 'Bac Scientifique' (Swiss A-levels equivalent), I then went on to study at the Zeichenlehrer Seminar at the Gewerbe Schule für Gestaltung in Bern. A very solid 5-years training that allows me to discover and acquire a wide range of artistic techniques both in two and three dimensions and the educational tools to transmit them.

Artistic influences:

It's hard to find a style or an artist that would have been decisive.

I would say: the surrealist approach, the energy of the expressionists, the social criticism of the Neue Sachlichkeit, the originality of the raw artists, the technique of the Flemish painters, the universality of the artists of the Renaissance, the radicalism of the Viennese performers, and also comics, cinema, video games, rock, psychiatry, spirituality, esotericism, philosophy, love.

When I work, I try to find subterfuges to be the least under influence, be it great predecessors or my own conscious desires. I do not have pleasure, and my work only makes sense, when I am the spectator of the current creation.

My last searches ? A kind of game of Rorschach without diagnosis in which, from spots of acrylic paint on cardboard or on Japanese paper, I train in paréidolia by varying the points of view to create dreamlike images. To do this, I mainly use charcoal, black chalk and chalk.

I find there without conscience or will, my obsessive concerns about the link to the other, the link to the subject, death, sex and reality. And my incessant quest for the "right vibration". The images that unfold remain a mystery.

The sculptures are made exclusively with newspaper and masking tape. These 2 trivial materials are enough to create all the vocabulary of the 3D expression: the line, the surface and the volume. I do not use armature.