Ugo Sébastião

It's a fascinating paradox: to question our current relationship with the thundering maelstrom of images we're subjected to, by linking it to the iconography of Baroque paintings.
Yet, this is precisely the approach taken by Ugo Sébastião, a French artist born in Lyon in 1998.
He could be characterized as a post-Mannerist, subtly unsettling the pre-established codes of image semantics, offering a contemporary interpretation of classical pictorial themes.

Sébastião forges new narrative paths through the use of contradictory materials, evocative chromaticism, and a highly tight framing. 
As a result, he isolates a detail, a portrait, or even an anecdotal element from a painting, aiming to neutralize it, objectify it, and ultimately infuse it with a new aura. 

The intensity emanating from this fragmented framing is then counterbalanced by Ugo's ingenious intervention on the medium itself. 
This highlights the evolution of how we perceive art, emphasizing how centuries of innovation have reshaped our way of consuming pictures.

More than just an anachronistic revisiting, his work primarily aims to expand the realm of possibilities. 
The result is new images, in tune with the changing demands of the contemporary world, which will continually disorient the spectator.

A graduate of the Beaux-Arts de Lyon in 2023, Ugo Sébastião's work has been exhibited in Paris over the last three years (primarily by galerie pal project, and more recently by galerie PACT). Internationally, his pieces have been shown in Bad Ischl, Austria, at the London-based Alice Amati gallery, and in Italy at Artissima (Turin), following a residency at Palazzo Monti (Brescia).