"He who must fight monsters should take care not to become a monster himself.

 

"Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond good and evil

 

If the monster really came over the Gods as Jean Clair could say, Stéphane Gerhards is one of the contempory artists who merely state it.

Fascinated since childhood by misshapen figures, the artist is able, over time, to give sense to the creatures he represents.

No need to go very far, indeed ...

 

In spite of the obvious fact of the trip, the journey is difficult :

it has been necessary to dig from the inmost depths of the psyche of souls, it will have been necessary to plunge the reality into a revealing bath  ! It has been necessary to dare to put himself (as well as his fellow men) in front of a mirror.

 

It springs an unbearable reflection. Because it is, bluntly, our image it gives to gaze at.

Resolutely expressionist with surrealist accents ; Stéphane Gerhards shows us a very clear nightmare to get rid of.

Sometimes representing the figure of the intrusive and castrating mother , sometimes the dehumanization of being reduced to its functionality or the helpless child, forced to undergo and adapt itself ...

 

His subjects look like building sites that need a work of reconstruction.

The artist imposes these brutal topics in a multidisciplinary language: from painting to drawing, to sculpture, fresco and etching. Resources in the service of a search for technical and figurative perfection to best serve the truth of his words.
"These are my state of heart which direct what I make. "

 

In this very personal project of destruction and reshaping where sensitivity is near savagery, where the grotesque joins control and where the scientific mates with the spiritual, the theme of animal acts as a keystone in his work.

That's how, the primary energy can be expressed freely. Almost weightless : as if it had returned to it's place.

 

It is thanks to this distance with human representation that, paradoxically, the artist speaks the best of what we can be ... so monstrous and so human.

 

Jean-Marc Reichart

traduction : Dany, Christean and Frans.Lemeire