Alexis de Chaunac
Medium: Drawing Studio Location: 44-02 11th Street - Studio# 509 Phone: 6465731374 Website:: http://www.silasvonmorisse.com/artists/alexis-de-chaunac Artist Bio: Rapidly up-and-coming artist, Alexis de Chaunac draws from literature, religion, mythology, art history, politics, and his own multicultural background to produce exuberant, mixed-media drawings. He describes drawing as "a transcendental language that anyone can understand." He works quickly, often with ink because of its fluidity, producing rich, multilayered works filled with faces and laden with cultural references. De Chaunac draws inspiration from such diverse artists as Rembrandt, Goya, Delacroix, Schiele, Picasso, and Francis Bacon, whom he groups together as "chroniclers of the human condition." His own artistic rendering of humanity comes from literature. He claims influences from the Scriptures to great epics and all the way to Beat Generation writers such as William S. Burroughs. Referring to his practice as contemporary myth making, he takes archetypes such as Oedipus, Jesus Christ or Dante "working out of them to explore the primitive aspects of the human being." Recognizing that art and the sacred have always been connected since both question death and challenge the passage of time, he recently took on a classical art subject of the Christian martyr Saint Sebastian. Though de Chaunac plans to pursue film, a medium with which he has recently begun to experiment, drawing remains at the heart of his practice. Born in New York and raised in Mexico City and Paris, he grew up surrounded by art and culture, drawing in the studio of his grandfather ??? a renowned Mexican artist Jose Luis Cuevas. He then lived for ten years in Paris immersed in European culture only to return to the US to study at the Sarah Lawrence College, NY. All images and text copyright Alexis de Chaunac