Emmanuel Ballangé

Painting like a scientist would hypothesise : with a certain distance… Since the start of his artistic career, Emmanuel Ballangé has always viewed the act of painting as a way of questioning his own presence when facing the canvas (with a certain desire for atopy – being somewhere one did not expect to be). Holding back, withdrawing, not doing too much, not being there too much, letting things evade him… As many injunctions that delimit his workspace. And while Ballangé’s paintings are more often than not organised into series, he still wants each canvas to answer one requirement : raising a question…

After studying anthropology at Bordeaux III University, Emmanuel Ballangé’s love of painting resurfaced in his thirties and he began to teach himself. He is convinced that painting takes on the question of the gaze in a very specific way. Painting induces a distanced gaze that goes beyond the sole function of recognition. It allows one to look at oneself looking – a self-reflective gaze.

Translated by Lucy Pons